�The�videos that so far comprise HEAP question our interactions with other cultures, our motivations, expectations, and experiences. They explore the gestures of daily life that link identity to place and culture, and the ways in which language, in its physical, visual, aural, and communicative characters, is the primary medium through which we might understand, or misunderstand, one another.� - Elaine Mehalakes, Kemper Curator of Academic Programs, Davis Museum, Wellesley College
�Just as the serious-minded traveler to a foreign land sacrifices certainty and ease of understanding to derive fresh insight, viewers of Ellen Zweig's video works must jettison their expectation of narrative in order to embrace Zweig's fragmentation � its disorientation and truthfulness. Her interwoven snippets of interview, performance, and language are decontextualized in a way that is apropos of her thematic consideration of how Westerners construct, imagine, and experience China and Chinese-ness from a distance. Her HEAP series is akin to being parachuted into profundity � your peripheral vision has to adapt hastily.� - Kevin Langson, San Francisco Bay Guardian
HEAP is an on-going series of video portraits of people who, throughout history, have studied, imagined, loved and misunderstood China. They explore China as seen through a Western eye. Stylistically, they are documentary and poetic, non-narrative and associative.