Wendy Zhang Zi-Feng 张子枫
Wendy Zhang was eight years old when Aftershock hit the screens. She played a girl lying trapped under the rubble, hearing her mother beg the rescuers to pull out her brother first. Two years later, Zhang won a Hundred Flowers Award for that role, and by the age of twenty she herself played an older sister who, after their parents' death, has to decide what to do with her younger brother. Wo De Jie Jie earned her a Huabiao Award. Audiences grew used to calling Zhang a little sister, just as they called her characters that. Later she got to play both a figure skater obsessed with winning and a police officer learning to tail a suspect from Jackie Chan's character in The Shadow's Edge.
Zhang Zi-Feng was born on August 27, 2001, in Sanmenxia, Henan Province. Her father worked for the local power supply service, her mother kept house and later took her daughter to auditions and accompanied her on shoots for many years. Zhang recalled that as a child she thought the actors on television were performing live, and wondered how they could speak and move in exactly the same way every time a show was repeated. In kindergarten Zhang took second place in a young singers' competition. Her teachers suggested she try her hand at commercials and recommended her to a Beijing agency. She started school a year late and, as she herself told it, she and her mother used the occasion to take a trip to Beijing and see the city. Zhang was about five. She no longer remembers what she was advertising in her first shoots, but soon afterwards she was offered a role.
One of her first jobs was Long Xu Gou (2009), a series based on a play by Lao She. The seven-year-old Zhang played Xiao Niuzi, who falls from a wooden footbridge into a ditch at night in the rain. The director explained to the girl that she would be caught below, but on the first take she clung to the plank in fright and the scene had to be reshot. At the same age she was invited to meet Feng Xiao-Gang. As Zhang recalled, they talked a little and the director decided she would play the young Fang Deng in Aftershock (2010). She had to learn the Tangshan dialect every day, and that is what she remembered as the hardest part of the work. Shooting the scene under the slab, she lay in the dust with her face pressed to the ground and cried. Zhang later said that at that age in such scenes she relied above all on her own feelings. Feng liked how much her eyes could express, and he gladly shot her in close-up. In 2012 she received the Hundred Flowers Award for Best Newcomer for the role of Fang Deng. She was eleven.
After that Feng Xiao-Gang cast her again in the historical drama Back to 1942 (2012). In My Old Classmate (2014) Zhang played the heroine as a child, and in Detective Chinatown (2015) by Chen Si-Cheng she was given the role of the schoolgirl Snow, one of the key figures in the investigation. Her smile in the final scene made audiences look at the girl in a new way. Zhang said she was afraid of ruining that shot, her last of the shoot. Smiling turned out to be easy; far harder was to play it so that the viewer had time to catch the change in her face. Six years later she played Snow once more in Detective Chinatown 3.
As a teenager Zhang combined shooting with studying at an ordinary school. When she was not filming, she took lessons with tutors or studied online. On set she tried not to open her textbooks between takes, because afterwards it was hard to get back into character. In Go Brother! (2018) she played Shi Miao, who in a fit of temper makes a wish — that her older brother would vanish from her life. Before this film Zhang and Peng Yu-Chang had never worked together. To get used to each other they talked a great deal before shooting, and Zhang brought him something to eat, as her character does in the film. For the scenes in which she pummels her brother, Zhang trained with the fight choreographers. The finale at the railway station was shot on a cold, rainy day. Zhang shivered so much that, by her own account, she even slapped herself to concentrate and imagined she was sunbathing on a beach. In its review HKCinema noted that it is precisely the charm of Zhang and her co-stars that helps one believe in the way the brother's and sister's relationship changes. That same year Iwai Shunji gave her two roles at once in Last Letter — she played the young Zhihua and Zhihua's daughter. For this work Zhang was nominated for a Golden Horse Award as Best Supporting Actress.
In 2020, Zhang enrolled at the Beijing Film Academy and began filming Wo De Jie Jie (2021) with Yin Ruo-Xin. Her character, An Ran, works as a nurse and plans to leave for Beijing to continue her studies, but after her parents' death she stays behind with a younger brother she barely knows. When shooting began, Zhang was eighteen, while her character was several years older. Zhang cut her hair short, visited a hospital to observe nurses at work, and herself suggested learning the Sichuan dialect. In time, according to the director, Zhang was speaking it even in ordinary conversations on set in Chengdu. In one scene, An Ran looks at her sleeping brother, and the director suggested that Zhang touch his face the way she would touch the face of someone close to her. At first the character sees in her brother a stranger's child foisted on her by adults, and this is one of the first moments when intimacy arises between them. In 2023, Zhang received the Chinese Huabiao Film Award for this role and became the youngest winner in her category.
That same year, 2021, saw the release of two films by Leste Chen starring Wendy Zhang. In the thriller Home Sweet Home, she played the daughter of Aaron Kwok Fu-Sing's character. The film began promotion in 2018, when HKCinema published the first posters featuring the characters, but the premiere had to wait several more years. After this grim story, Chen said he wanted to see Zhang smiling and cast her opposite Leo Wu Lei in the youth film Upcoming. In one scene, their characters watch a conversation between adults from afar and voice it. Zhang and Wu came up with the entire joking dialogue themselves right on set.
On the set of the romance Moonstruck (2024), Zhang was reunited with Hu Xian-Xu. In the series A Love for Separation, they had played childhood friends, and now they played newlyweds working in different cities. The film is set in the 1990s. Zhang had never played a married woman before. Her Lin Xiushan works in a factory, and to move with the practiced deftness of an experienced worker, the actress made dumplings every day. Preparing for the train scenes, she studied old photographs of passengers who knitted, cracked sunflower seeds or simply watched their fellow travelers on the road. In an interview about the film, Zhang said she takes it calmly that audiences still call her little sister. She sees it as a sign of affection.
In 2025, the Cannes Directors' Fortnight screened Girl On Edge by Zhou Jing-Hao. Zhang played Jiang Ning, a figure skater desperately trying to stay in the sport while her mother, who is also her coach, takes an interest in a new pupil. For this role, the actress put on skates for the first time and trained for about six months. That same year, she starred alongside Jackie Chan in The Shadow's Edge. Her He Qiuguo learns to tail suspects from Chan's character, a seasoned detective, and together with him takes on a gang led by Tony Leung Ka-Fai's character. She first saw Chan on screen as a child. By her recollection, the first film she ever watched was his The Myth.
In January 2026, the creators of the series Echoes of Encounter announced that filming had wrapped. Zhang was cast as Banxia, a girl left alone in a deserted city who finds a companion over the radio, a man living in another time.
