MIART 2023

Zhang’s choice of medium traces back to her childhood recollections of family and kinship. Distant memories of tenderness and delight are channeled into her palette of faded colors and composition of vaguely recognizable abstraction, and consequently underpaint her work with an ethereal haze of serenity and timelessness. In her intuitive process structured by the striated indexes of knitting and weaving, she portrays abstracted landscapes that obscure specificity of time and place, yet creates a vastly open sense of space through her use of cavalier perspective that is common in traditional Chinese scroll painting.

The group of new works, inspired by Zhang’s recent trip to Portugal, reflects her experience of crossing a rice field without a predetermined destination, and eventually arriving at the pleasant surprise of a sublime view of the ocean. The repeated motifs of the seascape and the directional line resembling a path take the viewer on a meditative journey towards the unexpected and transcendent. In their imagination of roaming through the landscape step by step, the viewer analogically relives the artist’s physical labor of weaving on a loom to create a work, and empathizes with her inner experience of solitude, contemplation and conviction. The works form a visual poem dedicated to the lone traveler that is in us all, in celebration of where we come from, where we destine, and the views in between.

From the sweeping curves of the rice fields to the rugged coastline, Zhang’s new works on view at MiArt are a stunning tribute to Portugal’s unique landscapes, with each piece offering a different perspective on the country’s natural beauty, where forms, textures, and colors blend with intricate patterns.