Zi Studio
Zi Studio
Zi Studio is an archive of multi-disciplinary exploration and experimentation by Zijun Zhao(赵梓俊).
Zi Studio explores the shifting relationships between space, objects, and people, tracing how they are formed, disrupted, and reimagined through everyday practices.
Zi Studio understands making as thinking, and design as questioning. Working across furniture, zines, photography, and installations, projects unfold through making, placing, using, and revisiting objects within everyday spaces.
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Shade to Light
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Shade to Light
Category: Installation, Furniture, Crafts
Measures: 60 × 60 × 100 in
Mediums:
lumber,
burlap fabric
,
LED light source
,
electrical wiring
metal components
Year: 2025
This project originates from my memories of Tangshan. In the year I returned to my childhood home, a dead tree stood at the entrance of our house. My father often told me that when he was young, he would sit beneath this tree to read, spending afternoons in its shade. That shadow once held his time, his learning, and his growth.
I wanted to bring this memory back, while also attempting to revive the dead tree in another form. I transformed the tree into a reading light, allowing it to function as a place for reading at night. The shade that once existed under daylight is converted into light after dark. What was once reading under the sun becomes reading beneath illumination.
Rather than restoring the tree as nature, this work treats memory as something that can be reactivated. It explores intergenerational storytelling, domestic history, and the shifting relationship between tree, light, and time. Reading becomes a way to reconnect with the past, and the dead tree is given a new presence, one that can still be used, inhabited, and remembered.
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©2026 Zi Studio. All works by Zijun Zhao.