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Staff profile

Overview

Lin 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. 

Important Past curatorial projects:

1. Landscape of One’s Own

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

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.

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