Li Zhang

BIO

Li Zhang is an artist and educator working across silk, painting, drawing, and ceramics.

Through layered surfaces and slow processes of accumulation, her work creates spaces where figures, plants, and fragments of memory quietly coexist. Rather than depicting transformation as a moment of change, she is interested in conditions of overlap, translucency, and continuous becoming.

Her practice is grounded in close attention to material and perception, exploring how images emerge, recede, and remain partially unresolved.

Zhang received her MFA from Iowa State University and exhibits nationally and internationally.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I approach painting as a way of making invisible relationships visible.

Bodies, images, landscapes, and memory are not separate subjects in my work. They are interconnected systems that continually shape one another.

My paintings explore how these relationships become perceptible, allowing familiar forms to reveal unexpected connections across time, culture, and memory.

Working on silk with mineral pigments and ink, I build images through translucent layers of line and color.

Rather than producing fixed representations, I understand painting as a process of emergence, where forms remain open, partially transparent, and continually evolving.

Figures dissolve into plants, landscapes merge with bodies, and historical references coexist with contemporary experience. Meaning unfolds gradually through sustained looking.

My practice moves between Chinese and Western painting traditions, approaching them not as opposing histories but as visual languages that continue to remember one another.

The materiality of silk connects my practice to the material legacy of Chinese painting, while references to Song dynasty bird and flower painting and Renaissance portraiture become part of the same visual conversation, while references to Song dynasty bird and flower painting and Renaissance portraiture become part of the same visual conversation.

Rather than reconstructing historical forms, I explore how images migrate across cultures, accumulate new meanings, and continue to transform through painting.

Each painting remains open to multiple ways of seeing. I hope the work encourages viewers to slow down, linger, and discover relationships that emerge through sustained looking.