CONTACT:
numberninezhang@gmail.com

This is the bio bit.

This is where I tell you all about me, my TV heads, artwork, my music, my vidyas, and other jazz with words so exacting, insightful and glorious that you’ll find yourself suddenly dancing about the den, around your personal computer, or in the attic where you read internet bios at the mere suggestion of the impossible aural wonder on offer.

Aren’t you excited!?! I sure am! 😀

Because I’ve been verified to be especially articulate by my friends, with my words spillowing out into the world with the precise grace, emotion, and feeling as I intended, so much so that you probably didn’t even notice that “spillowing” is a word I just made up! Sure, you may find some other uses of the word if you search on Google (with quotation marks in case it’s autocorrected to “pillowing”), but it sure felt RIGHT, didn’t it?

Hold onto that feeling, because it will carry you as I explain my biography

Are you holding tight?

You don’t have to, I was just kidding, you can relax. It’s good to relax as much as it is to feel excitement.

You ever watch a movie, such as a romantic comedy, where the couple finally becomes happy at the start of the second act, and you end up with that fuzzy “wow, things are going to be okay!” before the second half of the second act where conflict finally starts brewing? The feeling of true bliss before you realize “oh no, they’re probably gonna be broken up by the second act, which is bad, because that’ll make me feel sad!!!” Ignore that fear of the future, and just feel safe in that headspace where they decide to live happily ever after, like a musical that keeps on going after you leave the theatre during the second-to-last song.

That is the precise feeling I wish to immerse you in right now. That La La Land or Hitch feeling right now? Sink into it like a warm bath.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh

That is the level of comfort you should be at right now as we get onto the main body of what I truly have to say about myself as a creator.

So settle down as I tell you my tale, hopefully before you start developing watery wrinkles

This bio shall be full of the utmost direct information about myself, but I will admit, I will avoid using lots of superlatives, because not only will that seem somewhat suspicious and uncouth, it becomes tiring of the mouth muscles to read it aloud, even if one reads silently.

…thinking about it, I’m not sure why I didn’t just hire someone else to write the bio instead, so they could say nice, but tactful and unbiased things about my life story expanded up to the cosmic levels of intent. Was it merely my worry that they would instead debase the vision and compress my life story into flim-flam solely to be cut-and-pasted by future journalists? Or was it the money? This is a serious question.

Ah! My apologies, I’m just ruminating aloud. You can get out of the tub now. Perhaps wrap yourself in a nice towel, bathrobe, or both, and lie down on your bed as the air exfoliates your warm body as I at long last tell my joyous tale.

(PERSONAL DISCLAIMER: I am not a dermatologist who knows what “exfoliate” means — I make up words, not understand real ones)

Have you sat down? Excellent! Let us finally begin.

BA-BUM!

(that’s my dramatic intro sting)

Let’s start with who I am first, and then we’ll move onto my history.

My name is Nines Zhang, and I am an artist. Of what? Of mostly anything you can share on the internet! Granted, I can’t do Marina Abramović-esque performance art through digital media in the same way as it manifests in real life, but I can’t do that in real life either, so that’s not a big loss. I also can’t dance, which mildly is.

What my personal portfolio entails is largely of visual media, of drawing characters that I like, mostly with a singular motif (or as the big-bucks of the “art biz” like to call it: a brand) of surreal object heads, especially TVs. I film cosplay videos and take photos of myself dressing up as a TV head, make music based on characters I designed after the same model, and have incorporated this TV motif into the magnificent website you are currently reading this equally transcendent bio on, No Signal Studio! Waaaah!

There’s some of the stuff about my personality out! Now let’s talk about history.

No, I’m not talking about pyramids or the historical moments in America the world is currently going through, but personal history of myself and those who interacted with me, of which do not include your mother. She somehow keeps coming up on the internet, and yet I’ve never met her! I bet she’s lovely.

I was born in Los Angeles, California, USA, Earth, but I consider my true home to be Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Canada. I spent a good chunk of my early years growing up there, and it’s always been very nice, but due to an immigration screw-up regarding my father, a travel form, and a (by his account) especially vindictive border patrol officer, my family (myself included) have been pulled back and forth between these two locations, so I’m forced to consider LA an additional home by technicality.

Because of this instability of living spaces, my “formative” years were simply not, and I took to the only field an introverted, inconsistently-diagnosed child deemed a persistent stranger to their peers would turn to for approval (at least to my knowledge during the time): creative arts!

And you thought I was probably going to say “drugs,” ha! You should see the look on your face it was like

I pursued all the artforms that I wanted that didn’t involve me actually expressing myself as an individual personage (sorry, theatre!), and I eventually went to a high school with a dedicated art curriculum. I wasn’t able to get into it because the audition process was so convoluted and slanted against those without connections, and the school didn’t have much else, but it did attract me as a creative, which must count for something!

Nevertheless, I developed more of my personal skillset of visual arts, filmmaking, music-making, and writing. I also pursued programming because I believed at the time that working at Electronic Arts would be a sane career choice based on a tour of its Burnaby campus, before I wizened up and realized how un-fun that would be. I also pursued animation as a skillset of my arts pursuit, but then I learned how thankless it would be for solo artists on Youtube, and that interest has become a dormant dream. Also, 3D animation is very complicated and expensive.

Following high school, I went to the Nimbus School of Recording Arts for a year, and somewhat ill-advisedly took up the first year of its Video Production program. I have a diploma from it… I think, I’m not sure if it was sent, in part because I don’t think the program lasted more than its first year, and I can’t find any info on its site that they ever even had it except for a 15-second advertisement on their Youtube, enough to tell me I didn’t just hallucinate 8 months. I will say that it was a decent vocational program, and I found myself some good work attending there editing videos, filming studio shoots and music festivals… as well as some not-great work and not a lot of connections, on top of being a wild financial investment of ME paying to work for other people.

I did get to go to New York to film someone’s fashion shoot off the clout of me going to this program for a separate party, though, and that was nice! (even though the winter weather was kinda brutal)

Ever since that experience, I’ve been mostly on my own in the pursuit of a wild, Bohemian lifestyle every adolescent only dream of, in that they are only dreams. I have been keeping myself occupied with other project pursuits, of which I shall go over briefly now!

CHANNEL MONO
My indisputably most successful project to date, where I play a mysterious, offbeat, but cute TV head creature that lives in a realm of black and white named Mono. Sort of my own form of performance art, Mono regularly uploads photos and videos about whatever they like based on their approximately human perception of the world, the internet, fashion, and the fellow man. The tone of the content ranges from cutesy, to disturbing, to contemplative, to political, to comedic.

BITTER/SWEET
A music project I originally began as an April Fool’s joke. In December 2018, I drew a cute pair of TV head robots part of an idol band called BITTER/SWEET, and as April was pulling up, I decided it would be fun to do a couple of songs based on them. The response was genuinely big, and interest was drawn to making it more of a thing, so sporadically, I produce songs in their name. Lots of light dance punk and sweet future bass!