In these recent works, Zheng captures the potential and sense of magic she feels through uninhibited self-expression. Each painting is essentially a meditation, granting access to a place pulsing with symbolic potency. With reverence for art movements from spiritual abstraction to surrealism, Zheng’s depiction of nature is integrally tethered to bodily forms: sensual curves, undulating peaks, orbs, and fuzzy textures often reappear. In “Shimmering Sea Mountain,” a sun shines through a valley, and the resulting reflection off the water has an animistic quality: a painterly, yet cartoon-like chorus of neon-citrus ripples toward us, until it finally resolves into the calm of a mottled blue and green sea. As Barbara Pollock commented in her recent essay about the artist’s work: “Zheng views light as a kind of life force, necessary to propel a painting into a relationship with the viewer."

Forgoing a paintbrush, Zheng favors a bright palette rendered in oil sticks. Her process is physically demanding despite the intimate scale of the works. She is interested in the energy transference between her hands and the plasticity of her medium. She will often manipulate the dense layers with her fingers, and sometimes the pressure from her hands and fingerprints is made visible. Zheng’s handling reveals a versatile range of colors and textures: at times her vivid palette reads velvety soft, while other portions are scraped, ribbed, or speckled.

Like most of us, Zheng struggled with isolation throughout the pandemic’s lockdowns as her access to nature and the outdoors became severely limited. As a substitute for natural light, Zheng had to rely on artificial city lights, paying close attention to how they manipulate the sky as night gives way to day. The escape from reality her work had always provided was suddenly more necessary than ever. Nature both grounds and scales, and Zheng’s practice takes root in the humbling effect of being present. She acknowledges “human beings are a part of the universe” and whether “you are male or female, eventually our bodies become soil or dust into the air or on the ground.” 

Press release and images via McClain Gallery.