Foundation of Practice

Through early large-scale ceramic installations, form-driven experiments, and symbolic object work, ZAIN explored questions of identity, perception, and presence—many of which continue to resonate in her visual and spatial compositions today.

Between 2009 and 2017, ZAIN developed a series of sculptural ceramic installations that employed shoes as allegorical vessels for the self. These works—often suspended, paired, or encaged—questioned systems of identity, memory, gender, and societal constraint. The 2016 installation Ourselves – 100 Funeral Shoes for My Selves was a turning point: presenting over one hundred hand-formed ceramic shoes, it embodied the tension between repetition and uniqueness, entrapment and transcendence.

Critic Jean-Louis Poitevin described these early works as “the sacred trembling of the soul”—object-based rituals that transformed the familiar into the numinous. The use of clay and fire, and the dialogue between embodied form and symbolic structure, laid the groundwork for ZAIN’s later transition into painting as a mode of resonance.

Parallel to these sculptural works, ZAIN’s inquiry into “What is visible? What is real?” led her from symbolic objecthood to sensory abstraction

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2009년부터 2017년까지 전개된 대규모 도자 설치와 상징적 오브제 실험들은 자아, 기억, 사회적 정체성에 대한 질문을 담고 있으며, 이는 이후 진동 기반 회화와 장소 반응형 퍼포먼스로 이어졌습니다.

특히 2016년 설치작업 《Ourselves – 100개의 나의 영안실》은 상징적 오브제이자 감각적 매개체로서의 도자 신발을 통해 반복과 고유성, 억압과 초월 사이의 긴장을 시각화하였습니다. 프랑스 평론가 장 루이 쁘와트방은 이 작업을 “영혼의 떨림이 깃든 신성한 예술”로 언급하였고, 이는 이후 ZAIN이 회화를 통해 비가시적 에너지를 다루는 기반이 되었습니다.