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Staff profile

Overview

Linn Zhang

Research Postgraduate (PhD)

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Research Postgraduate (PhD) in the Department of Geography

Biography

I am a PhD researcher in the Department of Geography at Durham University. My PhD research project investigates value formation in the contemporary art market in the domain of affect. Professor Ben Anderson and Professor Anna Secor supervise me.

My project addresses the gap regarding the affects surrounding the global contemporary art space and how affect contributes to the value formation of the global art market. My research focuses on the Euro-Asian landscape of the global contemporary art market, which accounts for nearly half of the international contemporary art market by transaction value. This research project engages with ethnography, auto-ethnography, and in-depth interviews to investigate the affective dimensions of value formation in the contemporary art market, taking a transdisciplinary approach between affective geographies, curatorship, and cultural economies.

I am also an independent curator. My curatorial practice is a method of decentralising power and reimagining space. My curatorial practice is centred around key debates within human geography, an interdisciplinary field of the contemporary world. I also contribute articles to the Financial Times Chinese. 

Important Past curatorial projects:

1. Landscape of One’s Own (2023, London)

This exhibition explores the concept of home as a space that exists both internally and externally, physically and beyond. Home a a spatial imaginary that connects various geographical structures shaped by culture and socio-economic politics and relating to the construction of one’s identity.

Artists: Alvaro Barrington, Buket Yenidogan, David De Lima, Eleanor Wang, Lewis Brander, Linjing Peng, Marie Obegi, Marissa Stoffer, Naira Mushtaq, Stanislava Kovalcikova, Yingming Chen.

2. Even the Poets Were Jealous of This (2023, London)

Co-curated with Dr Anke Kempkes

This exhibition explores forms of historic and contemporary diasporic, as well as speculative and imaginative nostalgia, unfolding and emerging as “enigmatic, chaotic, incoherent, and structurally contradictory attachments“ (Berlant, 2011) in proximate, distant and non-linear space and time configurations: past, present and future. A critical understanding of nostalgia “challenges us to ask what exactly it is that we most want to imagine.”

Arists: Alice Rahon, Nicolaas Warb, Sonja Sekula, Aiko Miyawaki, Romany Eveleigh, Xiong Wenyun, Marissa Stoffer, Woo Jung Ghil, Linjing Peng.

3. Dancing Flame of the Ashes (2025, London)

Resulted from my residency project 

In 2024, I conceived, funded, and hosted a 1+5-month research residency for artist Marissa Stoffer on Mount Qingcheng, China. The residency was designed as an experiment in place-based knowledge production, creating conditions for artists to engage deeply with local ecologies, cultural histories, and philosophical traditions over an extended period. Developed during this residency, the resulting exhibition project, Dancing Flame of the Ashes, explored processes of transformation through natural pigments, Taoist cosmology, and ecological observation. The residency reflects my broader curatorial philosophy of creating spaces where artistic practice, environmental knowledge, and cultural dialogue can intersect, enabling new ways of thinking about human and more-than-human futures.

4. Reimagine Renaissance as a Contemporary Condition (2026, London) 

My curatorial project Reimagine Renaissance as a Contemporary Condition emerged from the PhD fieldwork I conducted in Florence in 2025. Developed as a symposium at the British Library with Artifact Futures, and a cross-site exhibition Echoes of Hope at Superlab Suisse, a biotech laboratory space in Switzerland. The project explored the Renaissance not as a historical moment but as a method of thinking and of reimagining the future through the past — one in which art, science, technology, and philosophy are understood as interconnected rather than separate domains.

This exhibition is an attempt to give form to those invisible forces and manifest hope into being through colours, sounds, and moving images emerged from human relationships, planetary knowledge, human and non-human intelligence, and its technological extension. This exhibition is the very manifestation of hope. Situated within a laboratory space, this exhibition is itself an experiment — one that brings ideas, cultures, technologies, and the humanities, and those yet to become dialogues. It does not seek to arrive at certainty, nor to offer a definitive answer. Instead, it opens a space of encounter — a space where different forms of knowledge production, imaginations, and experiences may come together.

Artists: Buket Yenidogan, Elise Guillaume, Matti Gao, Marissa Stoffer, Mete Kutlu.

I am also engaged in teaching activities:

2023-2024: PGTA for Level 1 Human Geography, Climate Change - Geography Perspective, Introduction to Human Geography Research Methods, Level 2 Political Geography

Nov 2024: Guest Speaker to BA Fine Art Students at Zurich University of Arts

Dec 2025 - April 2026: PGTA for Level 1 Human Geography, Introduction to Human Geography Research Methods

Research interests

  • Creative Geography, Cultural Geography, GeoHumanities, Art & Visual Culture, Affective life, Economies of Affect, Feminist Geography, Creative Research Methods

Publications

Journal Article