Stephanie Zhang

Instagram: @emergentvessels

Website: https://s-z.carrd.co/

Bio: Stephanie Zhang is an artist, scientist, and researcher whose work explores how order emerges from chaos. Rooted in complex dynamical systems and phenomenology, her practice deconstructs and reconstitutes material reality to give rise to emergent forms of life. In her lab-studio, she 3D-bioprints self-assembling living sculptures using novel bioinks composed of fungal and cellular matter— working with life as medium. Her work becomes a ritual of transfiguration: cracking open material reality to let something other assemble through it.

Statement: What does it mean to create with life itself as a medium? These sculptures are experiments in transfiguring life — each piece grown from engineered cellular bioinks, tracing the hidden architectures of vascular networks. Vascularization exemplifies the universal physical laws that govern life: order arising from chaos. Life is a dissipative structure, a local instantiation of order contributing to global entropy. These vessels are not static; they are processes, emergence made visible, revealing the aliveness underlying all phenomena. In these forms, one encounters both intimacy and vastness. They bear witness to the interconnectedness of existence and ask: what is the basic unit of aliveness? How does life organize itself? What is left behind -- and what is gained -- when phenomena shift between mediums? Emergent Vessels is an invitation to witness, to inhabit, and to feel the spaces between matter and energy, art and science, system and life.