Zheng’s paintings call for attentive viewing that takes into account how the works are made. Beginning with a somewhat anarchic approach, her self-made wooden stretcher frames are guided by intuition, taking on distinct shapes – slightly uncanny parallelograms that deviate from the rectangular norm. The frames then determine the images on the canvas, which balances the irregularity of their shapes. Materials like silk and wood selections such as mahogany, purple heart, and cherry serve not only as mediums but as metaphors for layers of memory and observation – silks as light, translucent, and evanescent as the wood is heavy and warm. Through her choice of the viewing distance and subject matter and by varying the transparency of paint embedded in silk canvas, Zheng takes control of the layers of legibility in her images. Influenced by Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, Zheng’s transparency recurs as a technical and conceptual motif, and it is through games of legibility, illegibility, and memory that she plays with the viewer’s perceptions of image and objecthood.

In Zheng’s process of approaching German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s ‘Monadology,’ each work reflects a moment unto itself while hinting at a universal interconnectedness. This sheds light on the artist’s understanding of her works in conversation with each other. In Untitled (Window), 2023 the focus is on folding ephemeral organic forms while in Untitled (Leibniz’s Calculus machine), 2024 the stark precision of mechanical apparatuses takes the fore. At other times, it is through networks of references – for example, within a series of small portraits Untitled (Pasolini’s Riccetto), 2024, Untitled (Nijinsky), 2023, and Untitled (Sick Man of Roger de La Fresnaye), 2023 – that Zheng observes through duplications, deletions, and inversions unveiling connections, relations, and resemblances.

Zheng reflects on her practice as inflected by motifs and variation, “Motif is the academic term, but I prefer to call them forms: Curtains and folds, the fusée (an engine of time), the machine in general, and my off-vertical black stripe.” Throughout the development of her works, such forms undergo many changes – transformed, substituted, altered, and deviated. When forms and variation collide, a gradual process of revealing occurs: Unfolding through a leveling of authorship and coexistence of silence, stillness, and living energy.

Press release courtesy Mendes Wood DM