100 Days is an annual project at New York City’s School of Visual Arts that was founded by Michael Bierut. Each year, the students of the school’s Master’s in Branding Program spend 100 days documenting their process with a chosen creative endeavor. This year, we’re showcasing each student in the program by providing a peek into ten days of their project. You can keep an eye on everyone’s work on our SVA 100 Days page.
Zihao (Bruce) Zhang loves his culture, always endeavoring to integrate ancient Chinese traditions with modern ideas and media. Hanzi, as a writing system and the accumulation of Chinese civilization over thousands of years, is the perfect vehicle for information and thought. Chinese Hanzi has continuously evolved with the times, combining to create new words, with little need for creating entirely new characters. However, Zhang wanted to use this ancient and concise symbolic form to express some modern and emerging concepts. For his 100-Day project, Zhang aimed to showcase the expressive adaptability of the 8,000-year-old pictographic script. Zhang likens this project to a dialogue with the ancients who continuously created and improved Hanzi over millennia.
Discover more of Zihao Zhang’s project on Instagram.