I make irregularly shaped paintings because I want them to point to, and make notice of, all the other irregularities in the world… that’s how I want to think of the paintings’ presence—a totality of the painting object. The decision of destabilizing the painting’s infrastructure comes not from starting with the 0, but with the -1; it begins even before a thought of a painting could take place.
– Leah Ke Yi Zheng
Leah Ke Yi Zheng’s art marries the techniques of Chinese painting with histories of the Western avant-garde, revised and updated into both a personal and poetic vision. Her paintings follow two key physical characteristics: each utilize silk fabric stretched over hand-crafted hardwood stretchers, each has a unique contour, striking an eccentric and fluid conversation between rigidity and suppleness. Zheng apprenticed in traditional Chinese painting techniques from an early age, and continued her art studies in the United States, synthesizing divergent cultural practices which now determine a singular temporality that harness the forces and consequences of globalization.
Her practice exists within the critical space between one’s mind and a surface of perception. Machine gears, I-Ching hexagrams, fictional portraits, and phantasmagoria develop within a delicate but firm compositional structure of lines both fixed and open-ended. The silk medium offers a gossamered effect, and this translucence is flooded by an emotion of color as light changes effortlessly in a transcendental elucidation of her own artistic decisions. Her works revise the deliberate framework of painting, attending to the very nature of painting itself, its histories, and its capacity for spirit; they call forward the abstract field of a viewer’s individual perception and innermost subjective experiences.
Recent solo and two person exhibitions include Leah Ke Yi Zheng, Mendes Wood DM, Brussels, John Cage & Leah Ke Yi Zheng, CASTLE, Los Angeles, USA (2024); Leah Ke Yi Zheng, David Lewis, New York, USA (2023); Leah Ke Yi Zheng & Danny Bredar, Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago, USA (2022). Recent group exhibitions include Everyone Loves Picabia, David Lewis, New York, USA (2024) and Soul Mapping, Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium (2023).
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