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.

My work begins with the idea that bodies, images, landscapes, and memories are never entirely separate. They pass through one another, carrying traces of what came before. A figure may dissolve into a plant, a landscape may enter a body, or an image from another time may surface within the present. Through painting, I explore these moments of contact, when one form begins to inhabit another and new relationships become visible.
I work primarily on silk with mineral pigments and ink, building images slowly through translucent layers of line and color. Silk is not simply a surface in my work. Its translucency allows images to overlap without fully obscuring one another, while its absorbency makes every mark responsive to what has already been placed beneath it. Forms accumulate, recede, and reappear. Painting becomes less a way of fixing an image than a process of allowing one image to emerge through another.

My practice is shaped by both Chinese and Western painting traditions. I am particularly drawn to the attentiveness to nature and material found in Chinese painting, as well as the ways the body and human presence have been imagined within Western art. I do not see these histories as separate or opposing. They are visual languages that can meet, overlap, and change through the act of painting. Historical images enter my work not as quotations to be reconstructed, but as forms that continue to carry memory and acquire new meanings in the present.

Across my work, transformation is often quiet rather than dramatic. A body becomes entangled with branches; flowers conceal and reveal a face; fragments of landscape, ornament, and memory coexist within a single image. These relationships are intentionally left unresolved. I want the paintings to remain permeable, allowing different histories, bodies, and ways of seeing to inhabit the same space without collapsing into one another.

Painting, for me, is ultimately a way of attending to these connections. I hope the work asks viewers to slow down and look long enough for relationships that are initially hidden to begin to reveal themselves.