Between Mediums, Between Worlds: Amanda Zheng’s Art of Tension

Words by Velin

There’s a certain kind of artist who doesn’t just work within a medium but wrestles with it. For Amanda Zheng, the act of creation is also the act of undoing. Not as rebellion, but as revelation. In her world, clarity is elusive, distortion is deliberate, and everything begins in the space between.Amanda is a graphic design student at Parsons School of Design, but her work is far from confined to the tools of her discipline. Raised in New Zealand and now based in New York, her practice exists at the intersection of fine art, graphic design, and experimental material work. Whether through matte medium transfers, metal engraving, or the softness of organza, Amanda’s work refuses easy categorization. It’s not just beautiful. It’s uneasy, obsessive, and hypnotic.“I’m kind of in this grey space between graphic design and fine arts and that unsettles me,” she admits. “I’m compelled to chance and experimenting like a fine artist, but my work is presented in a graphic design context through books and printed matter.”That grey space is where Amanda finds her edge. Her originality doesn’t come from chasing difference, but from surrendering to duality. Between structure and spontaneity. Beauty and fracture. Design and destruction. She lives in the liminal, and turns it into power.

Material First, Subject Later

Amanda’s process begins not with concept or emotion, but with material. Her choices are visceral. Textures that shimmer or obscure, surfaces that resist clarity. Glass. Metal. Organza. Frosted acrylic.“I become obsessed with a certain type of texture, color or transparency first,”“Although I work in mostly 2D forms, I use 3D materials like these to make my work ambiguous. These materials distort my subjects, and I find that so much more attractive and engaging when you don’t know what you’re looking at.”For Amanda, this ambiguity isn’t a glitch. It’s the point. Form dictates feeling, and the tactile becomes emotional terrain.

From Creation to Destruction

Originally trained in oil painting, Amanda’s work has shifted toward mediums that dismantle as much as they build. Transfers. Engraving. Layering. She’s moved from control to chaos, and that move has meaning.“I’ve kind of maneuvered from the act of creating to the act of destroying,”“Perfectionism is something I deal with in both my career and personal life… That’s mostly why I’ve started to create work that removes that sense of control, and instead my art is created from chance and experimentation.”What looks fractured is in fact intentional. A rebellion against the toll of perfectionism, and a redefinition of effort as the art itself.

Graphic Design as a Structure

While Amanda pushes against control, she’s also deeply rooted in design. Not the kind obsessed with alignment and typesetting, but in the kind that uses format as a frame for vision. Her background in graphic design has become a scaffold to hold her experimentation.“My work comes from leaning into chance rather than strict adherence to a certain medium or form,”“Since I’m a graphic design student at Parsons, a lot of my design projects have been editorial books or printed matter… Having a background in fine art has helped me elevate commercial client design projects into something more bespoke.”It’s not about choosing between fine art and design. It’s about letting one discipline destabilize the other until something new emerges.

Conceptual Focus

Beneath the textures and distortions lies a current of obsession. Amanda’s work is driven by repetition, effort, and an emotional hunger to become what once felt unreachable.“I’m basically just an art kid in New Zealand,” “The underlying thread that has really persisted… is the ritualistic effort I needed to surrender to create the life that I wanted. I want that obsession to come across in my works, but also bathe in that struggle, and how meditative and rewarding that process can be.”Her subjects have shifted over time. From faces to animals. From identity to myth. But the throughline remains: the tension of becoming, and the pull of the impossible.

Digital-Aware but Not Trend-Chasing

Amanda’s clarity of voice extends to how she navigates the digital space. Though she’s grown up online, she actively resists the pressure to conform to what the algorithm wants.“I’m navigating the fine art space but with a younger approach. Having grown up on social media, I’d like to combine the two and use my platform to reach the right audience whilst creating art and content that is experimental and fresh” “I want to continue exploring my interests in the city, experimenting at Parsons, and obsessively researching subjects that matter to me the most… and hopefully that can translate through not only my work, but my online presence, and inspire others to do the same.”In a world driven by immediacy and visibility, Amanda chooses intention. She creates from the inside out, not for the feed. Amanda Zheng’s work is not a destination but a crossing. Each piece holds tension between control and release, art and design, clarity and disruption. She doesn’t resolve the contradiction. She lives inside it. In that liminal space, she builds something honest, obsessive, and entirely her own.