Exhibition View of “Transience”: Zhang Yanzi Art Exhibition
On April 15, 2025, “Transience”: Zhang Yanzi Art Exhibition, chaired by the academic Fan Di’an, Chairman of the China Artists Association, and curated by Ji Shaofeng, was grandly unveiled at Hubei Museum of Art. As a large-scale solo exhibition of the artist that has attracted much attention, “Transience” offers a review of her creative context, and a presentation of her latest creative series that runs through her thinking on “how art responds to the essence of life”.
Exhibition View of “Transience”: Zhang Yanzi Art Exhibition
Lin Mao, President of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, said in his congratulatory letter: “In this exhibition, Professor Zhang Yanzi transformed the philosophical observation of ‘The existence of man between heaven and earth is like a white colt bolting a gap, in the twinkling of an eye’ by Zhuang Zhou (369-286 BC) into a very contemporary visual field. The exhibition takes ‘transience’ as the core proposition, and systematically presents the experimental exploration of artist Zhang Yanzi and her artistic practice in recent years through four major themes, eight groups of representative works and a 40-meter wall with extensive literature. Among them, ‘Investigating Things to Seek Knowledge’, ‘Elusive, Evasive’, ‘Cracked Strokes Like Urticaria’ and ‘The Edge of the World at Close Quarters Series’ are all new works that she created in the past two years. Experiencing the collision of traditional ink painting, mixed media and digital media, she builds a spiritual corridor that runs through ancient and modern eras. This creative path forms an intertextuality with the aesthetic tradition of ‘Great form has no contour’ in Hubei (the cradle of the Chu culture), but it also provides a contemporary interpretation for Eastern aesthetics in the context of globalization.”
Exhibition View of “Transience”: Zhang Yanzi Art Exhibition
At the opening ceremony of the exhibition, Ji Shaofeng, Director of Hubei Museum of Art and curator of this exhibition, Professor Liu Qinghe, former Dean of the School of Chinese Painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Professor Zhan Wang, PhD supervisor of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and Professor Liu Libin, PhD supervisor of the School of Art Management and Education at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, were interviewed. Professor Xia Kejun, PhD supervisor of Renmin University of China, shared his view on this exhibition and Zhang Yanzi’s artistic creation.
Ji Shaofeng believes that Zhang Yanzi has changed the audience’s comprehension of a single medium through the multi-dimensional and international works in this exhibition. This exhibition shows that Zhang Yanzi’s works have jumped out of the single narrative of ink and wash, from the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional, from the graphic to the stereoscopic, from the static to the dynamic, including ready-made products, which have also been cleverly used in her creation, forming her unique multi-dimensional expression. Meanwhile, Zhang Yanzi’s creation is not dominated by technology, but she emphasizes problem awareness. She is very sensitive and treats current life situations with delicacy, showing a unique female perspective. It can be seen that the artist draws inspiration from both traditional culture, such as Dunhuang art, and real life. The aura of art, expressed through Zhang Yanzi’s trivial, complex and diverse expressions, triggers the audience to think and feel the healing power of art while watching high-quality works with an international perspective.
Elusive, Evasive (detail), 200×120cm, 2024-2025, Exhibition View
In Liu Qinghe’s opinion, Zhang Yanzi’s “Transience” is not sudden at all, but the result of years of accumulation of work. Starting from ink and wash to today, Zhang Yanzi’s practice has injected vitality into ink and wash. He believes that from the perspective of contemporary art, ink and wash is more of a reference for Zhang Yanzi. Among ink painters, it is very rare to have such an ability to grasp space, time and materials. Zhang Yanzi has taken a new path with her works. With her delicate and bold use of materials that not only pay attention to the characteristics of materials but also grasps the overall pattern, she has demonstrated her unique artistic pattern and transcendent vision.
Chu Shu (End of Heat), 60×37cm, Mixed media, 2022.
Zhan Wang talked about his overall impression of the artist Zhang Yanzi, who is different from the average Chinese painter. Zhang Yanzi loves to think, and she generates new ideas. Ideas are the most important creative method in contemporary art. He believes that Zhang’s art is increasingly moving towards a state of providing ideas, which is very important for the creative model of traditional Chinese painting.
Elusive, Evasive (fragments); Mixed media, 200×120cm, 2024-2025.
Liu Libin has been following Zhang Yanzi’s artistic development for more than 20 years. He believes that in addition to the varied forms, Zhang Yanzi has a very sensitive perception and delicate expression, which is not limited to lines, expression and colors. She integrates the elegance of Chinese painting, the pain of body posture and her thinking on gender themes into her creation, forming a creative thread with a unique appearance, breaking through the limitations of Chinese conceptual artists since the 1980s who “surrender to materials” rather than activate the works themselves, and also breaking through the dilemma facing female artists. What shocked him was that even though Zhang Yanzi used a lot of materials in her works, she could always make her unique characteristics recognizable, which are revealed from the artist’s individual qualities and warm expression. In his opinion, many male artists are too concerned with converting materials into symbols and the key attributes of their own creations. On the contrary, Zhang Yanzi’s smooth control using in materials, concepts and personal expression may bring inspiration to later generations.
The Edge of the World at Close Quarters, Video installation, 2025.
Xia Kejun believes that Zhang Yanzi has keenly captured the “crux” of our era in art and life since 2012. In response to these themes, she has developed a unique artistic technique: analgesic plasters. In the context of modernity, art is always inseparable from the perception of life and the healing function of art. Especially since 2020, this premonition-like way of feeling is particularly important to us. In the spatial treatment of “Investigating Things to Seek Knowledge”, she broke the discipline of traditional calligraphy and nine-square grids, made full use of the unique handcraft style of women, and created a space between rigidity and flexibility that people can feel personally. Through a system of mending, to heal the trauma of our time. “The Edge of the World at Close Quarters Series” presents a unique visual expression. She draws on the concept in traditional Chinese landscape painting, uses a small ruler similar to a compass, and combines it with contemporary imaging technology to enlarge it, allowing the audience to re-experience the visual perception of “seeing the big in the small”. In “Cracked Strokes Like Urticaria”, she transforms the traditional Chinese perception of “empty white” into a vast expanse of emptiness, and uses a technique as subtle as Braille to guide the audience to become “blind” and enters an invisible contemporary conceptual space. This is both a tribute to tradition and a reinterpretation of a contemporary visual experience.
As the artistic director of this exhibition, Fu Zhongwang commented that it was difficult to describe Zhang Yanzi’s art in words. Her exhibition is like an experiment on ink cognition or daily object cognition. Through her unique, delicate, warm and very precise vision, she cleverly combines ink and mixed media to observe the daily things that people are accustomed to, and through artistic processing and refinement, she makes daily life unusual, and again makes it very real. This real feeling can be connected with every audience.
Rules—Scale—Concern—No Trace
The exhibition takes “rules—scale—concern—no trace” as the narrative axis, constructing a philosophical framework from cultural discipline to individual awakening, from physical measurement to spiritual transcendence. “Investigating Things to Seek Knowledge” is based on “Disciples’ Rules”. With the help of the red grid, a visual framework of Chinese traditional cultural enlightenment, is built to be a cognitive schema connecting the past and the present. As Chairman Fan Di’an said in his article: through “slow but careful work”, to reach a profound space of thought is Zhang Yanzi’s basic working method, which also enables her to continuously form a psychological fit with Chinese traditional cultural resources. Walking into Zhang Yanzi’s exhibition space is like wandering in a “surreal” world. The title of the exhibition, “Transience”, shows that she always generates randomly and naturally, transforming the encounters of life into life experience and cultural discourse.
Investigating Things to Seek Knowledge, 700×300cm, 2025, Exhibition View.
Investigating Things to Seek Knowledge (detail), 700×300cm, 2025.
“The Edge of the World at Close Quarters Series” conveys the artist’s alternative thinking about scale from a unique perspective. Visitors can see a moving, expanding, and infinite universe through the small ruler embedded on the wall, and experience the dialectical relationship between the distance and size of all things, as well as the macro and micro scales.
The Edge of the World at Close Quarters Series, Video installation, 2025.
“Her 24 Solar Terms” is woven from 24 groups of very different and interrelated works. The audience needs to appreciate the 24 groups of works together to form a complete narrative. Through the concept of “24 Solar Terms” in traditional Chinese culture, fruits, vegetables, dried fruits, and cordyceps in daily life are linked to the female body. With four years as a chapter, each chapter is ordinary. With the most plain perspective and images, materials, and language with a synaesthesia experience, a microscopic picture of life spanning nearly a hundred years is formed, vividly showing the greatness of ordinary life.
Her 24 Solar Terms, Dimension variable, 2022, Exhibition View.
Xia Zhi (Summer Solstice), 98×98cm, Mixed media, 2022.
“Elusive, Evasive” is the artist’s new work from 2024 to 2025, and it is also its debut show. This group of works was inspired by Dunhuang, and they form a negative space through hollowing out the outline, and embedding a wave mirror, so that figures of visitors and the colors of the mural paintings blend with each other, realizing the clever translation of traditional culture in the current context. This work echoes the fragments of Dunhuang mural painting from a distance, forming an intertextual relationship.
Elusive, Evasive (detail), 200×120cm, 2024-2025, Exhibition View. 
Elusive, Evasive (fragments), 67 pieces, assorted size, 2024-2025, Exhibition View.
“Encounter” consists of 10 hollow scrolls, 3.2 meters high and 90 centimeters wide, hanging in the space. The unique design of the hollow scrolls blurs the boundaries between the observer and the observed, and triggers thinking about the relationship between the inside and the outside. Although it is a scroll, it changes the way of viewing paintings by older generations. Through this hollow hole, the viewer can construct the infinite possibilities of the “original painting”, which also triggers thinking about the relationship between the inside and the outside.
Encounters, 320×90cm, Mixed media, 2023, Exhibition View.
“Cracked Strokes Like Urticaria” (30 pieces) are created with medical tweezers and surgical instruments on rice paper. They look empty from a distance, but when you look closely, you can feel a poetic pain, a kind of beauty about Chinese landscape painting. “Urticaria” is an allergic phenomenon, and “brushstrokes” is a classic technique of Chinese landscape painting. The artist combines the phenomenon of body allergies with “brushstrokes”, which is also a collision between tradition and contemporary expression, and a poetic expression of “pain”. The missing circles of different sizes in each work form another corresponding work, which echoes the “The Genetic Lottery” on the literature wall.
Cracked Strokes Like Urticaria, 121×81cm, mixed media, 2025, Exhibition View.
Cracked Strokes Like Urticaria, 121×81cm, mixed media, 2025
The Genetic Lottery, 132×200cm, 2024.
The long scroll “Painted Skin” in the middle of the exhibition hall is divided into 15 chapters. The artist uses various masks to conduct in-depth discussions on issues such as identity and belonging, individual and collective, race and belief. Interestingly, this work, which has been exhibited many times at home and abroad, was peeled off by the artist into two pieces and exhibited together, expressing the question of what is under the skin, which is what the artist has been asking.
Painted Skin, 900×40cm, Mixed media on cotton, 2020, Exhibition View.
Painted Skin, 900×40cm, Mixed media on cotton, 2020.
There is also a document exhibition with the 40-meter document installation that runs through the exhibition hall. It is interspersed with the artist’s creations over the past 20 years. From a large number of documentary materials and creative manuscripts, we can clearly see the process from the germination to the implementation of a work, which also shows the artist Zhang Yanzi’s speculation and exploration in her personal creation process over the past 20 years. This exhibition is an experiment on the cognition of ink and wash or daily objects. There are also many handwritten comments on the artist by art theorists and critics around the works. The exhibition layout is as vivid and warm as Zhang Yanzi herself. The literature wall also forms an intertextual relationship with the four exhibition halls. The exhibition remains on view till May 11, 2025.
The 40-meter document installation features the artist’s creations over the past 20 years.
View the Opening Ceremony
About the Exhibition
Transience: Zhang Yanzi Art Exhibition
Academic Host: Fan Di’an
Curator: Ji Shaofeng
Dates: April 15-May 11, 2025
Venue: Hubei Museum of Art
Edited by Sue and Heather/CAFA ART INFO
Image Courtesy of the Artist and Hubei Museum of Art.
