YIMING ZHU: SUMMONING

Yiming Zhu’s photographic practice draws from the margins - where folklore meets memory, and personal experience becomes myth. Currently based in London after graduating from the Royal College of Art’s Photography programme, Zhu’s work probes the visual possibilities of belief, superstition, and spiritual intimacy. Her images are staged but not false, speculative but deeply rooted in lived experience, invoking a space where the uncanny folds into the everyday.

In Summoning, Zhu interweaves oral traditions from her native Guangdong with observations gathered from life in London. Garlic, mirrors, candles, peach branches - these everyday objects are transformed into quiet conductors of energy, story, and spectral meaning. Each photograph becomes a portal, carrying layered symbols drawn from folk beliefs, fairy tales, and inherited rituals. Through this project, Zhu explores how spiritual experience survives modernity: not in grand temples, but in small domestic gestures, in whispered warnings and ancestral echoes.

Her works do not aim to persuade, but to open a space of resonance - where uncertainty becomes language, and shared symbols might spark private revelations. She is not asking whether gods exist, but how they move through us: in memory, imagination, and metaphor. Faith, here, is not doctrine but a visual syntax, something glimpsed rather than known, summoned rather than defined.

Zhu’s images do not distinguish between documentary and fiction. They move fluidly between personal mythology and collective memory, offering viewers the chance to encounter their own ghosts - cultural, emotional, or otherwise.

Apple and Knife, 2023

The artist recalls a ghost story from her childhood: if you peel an apple in front of a mirror at midnight, and the peel breaks, a ghost will be summoned. Apple and Knife captures this intimate superstition with eerie tenderness. The mirror becomes a portal, the apple a fragile offering, the act itself a quiet ritual of desire and danger.

Here, the photograph functions like a spell-simultaneously protective and curious. Zhu blurs the line between childish play and ancestral fear, suggesting that even the smallest gestures can open doors between worlds.

Lead the Way, 2023

This work draws on the Qingming Festival in Southern China, where families burn incense, light candles, and place symbolic offerings to guide the spirits of ancestors home. In Zhu’s hometown, she recalls an unusual variation: placing garlic on a peach branch to illuminate the way. What might seem absurd is in fact deeply poetic - an image of tenderness embedded in folk logic.

Through stillness and symbolism, Zhu renders this memory into a visual poem. The branch becomes a torch. The garlic, an anchor. The space, though mundane, becomes sacred through attention and framing. In doing so, Lead the Way meditates on how diasporic identity preserves belief not through monuments, but through gestures. Through the repetition of care.

Images: ©Yiming Zhu, Courtesy of the Artist

Editor: MIAO