Ping Zheng @ The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield - Where Memories of Travels

Ping Zheng: Where Memories of Travels 

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield 

September 7, 2023 - January 7, 2024 

PING ZHENG  

The Moon Illusion, 2022 

Oil stick on paper

Private Collection 

© Ping Zheng

Courtesy of the Artist and 

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presents Ping Zheng: Where Memories of Travels Go, an installment of Aldrich Projects, a quarterly series that features one work or a focused body of work by a single artist on the Museum’s campus.

The project title describes Ping Zheng’s aim to be transported through her creative process in her pursuit of loftier dimensions. Her solitary journeying, initially a way to create refuge from an oppressive childhood in China, evolved into a means to evade the entrapments of our impersonal digital world. Ping Zheng takes inspiration from the varied and expansive landscapes she visited during the numerous artist residencies she has attended over the last decade throughout the United States, Europe, and China.

She also cites artists that orbit many centuries and geographies who too made work that merge their experiences of the natural world with a special blend of personalized spiritualism. Her sources are wide-ranging and span ancient Chinese landscape painting and twentieth and twenty-first century visionary abstractionists like Hilma af Klint, Agnes Pelton, Georgia O’Keeffe, Judy Chicago, Matthew Wong, Joseph E. Yoakum, and Takako Yamaguchi. Working exclusively in oil stick, Ping Zheng presses fingers to paper through intuitive systems of choreographed movements. She builds a distinctive and recurring lexicon of symbolic couplings that range from lighthearted rainbows and pulsating waterfalls, shadowy tree lines and glowing moonbeams, voluptuous mountains and rippling lakes, to cascading canyons and sunny orbs. The works are installed in a sequence that reflects the dramatic passage of light from daybreak to nightfall. Some works feature celestial objects and cosmic phenomena that underscore the unpredictable magic of our sizable planet.

Ping Zheng

Where Memories of Travels 

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum 

This project is accompanied by a full-color eight-page ‘zine 

designed by the Museum’s Design Director Gretchen Kraus. 

PING ZHENG was born in 1989 in Zhejiang, China and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2016 and a BFA in Painting from the University College of London, Slade School of Fine Art in 2014. Her works are included in the collections of JP Morgan Chase Bank, Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection, the Cleveland Clinic Art Program, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Ping Zheng: Memories of Where Travels Go is curated by Amy Smith-Stewart, Chief Curator.

THE ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM

258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877

www.thealdrich.org

Ping Zheng @ McClain Gallery, Houston - The Voice of Water

Ping Zheng: The Voice of Water

McClain Gallery, Houston

Through January 8, 2022

McClain Gallery presents an exhibition of new oil-stick-on-paper paintings by Ping Zheng (b. 1989 in Zhejiang, China). Zheng’s imagery is rooted in nature but operates in a richly symbolic realm where the vibrational energy of the natural world merges with biomorphic abstraction. In depicting landscapes both real and imagined, Zheng embodies a space where she has long found freedom and solace. The Voice of Water is the artist’s second solo exhibition, following the gallery inaugural presentation of her work online in 2020.

In these recent works, Ping 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, Ping 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, Ping 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. Ping 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, Ping 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, Ping 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 Ping 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.” 

PING ZHENG (b. 1989 in Zhejiang, China, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) received an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2016 and a BFA in painting from the University College of London, Slade School of Fine Art in 2014. Her works have been exhibited at Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn NY, Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York, NY, the Chinese American Arts Council/Gallery 456, New York, NY, and Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, among other venues. She has completed artist residencies at the Rancho Linda Vista Arts Community, in Oracle, Arizona, and the Vermont Studio Center, in Johnson, Vermont among others. Recently, Ping Zheng has been reviewed in ArtForum, the New Yorker, and featured on Glasstire. She is co-represented by Kristen Lorello, New York.

McCLAIN GALLERY

2242 Richmond Avenue, Houston, TX 77098

www.mcclaingallery.com

______________