Ping Zheng

  • Her art shows an appreciation for the otherworldly abstractions of Swedish mystic Hilma af Klint and the tortured visionary landscapes of Forrest Bess. Zheng’s pictures, however, are earthier, more insouciant, and more humorous—while they unequivocally embrace the cosmic, they also invoke the sensual.

    –Wendy Vogel 

  • B. 1989, ZHEJIANG, CHINA

    LIVES AND WORKS IN BROOKLYN, NY

    DOWNLOAD ARTIST CV

     
  • When Chinese-born artist Ping Zheng was still a child, she walked into a field of red wild berries, a sea...
     
     
    When Chinese-born artist Ping Zheng was still a child, she walked into a field of red wild berries, a sea of red beneath a yellow sun. She felt suddenly relieved of her mother's constant criticism. Freedom, the very opposite of the expectations for a little girl in a conservative household, exploded within her. It is a memory she carries to this day. In her own visual vocabulary, Zheng reenacts this moment repeatedly in ways that bring a sense of unbounded creativity to viewers through a use of forms and symbols of her own making. Though seemingly as naïve as a nursery rhyme, her works are also quite complex, encompassing several different interpretations of the word, Reflection, the title of this series. 
     
    Born in the port city of Wenzhou in the south of China, Zheng moved frequently following her father's trajectory from a miner to an architect, residing for much of her life in Shanxi province, north of Beijing. As a teenager, she left home to escape the grim punishments from her family only to find herself in the monotonous training of the Central Academy High School in Beijing. The school had an exchange program with Camberwell College under the University of the Arts in London which she eagerly joined to escape the strictures she had experienced in China. From there, she pursued a superlative education at Slade's and then, a master's degree at Rhode Island School of Design.
    –Barbara Pollack
    excerpts from essay: Ping Zheng Reflections
     
    Ping Zheng 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. 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, Zheng has been reviewed in ArtForum, the New Yorker, Houston Chronicle, and featured on Glasstire. 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. She is co-represented by Kristen Lorello, New York.

  •  

    "I like spending a lot of time processing and communicating with my artwork. I think this is how the subconscious mind brings me a particular focus in creativity, approaching art as a means of personal development."

    –Ping Zheng

     

     

  • Mountain Night, 2023 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Natural Vibration, 2022, (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Pink Sky, 2022 Private Collection (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Under the Sun, 2019 Collection of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Breathing, 2022 Private Collection (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Mountain Night, 2023

     

  • PING ZHENG: WHERE MEMORIES OF TRAVELS GO The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is...
    Ping Zheng, Pink Sky 2022, oil stick on paper, Private Collection
     

    PING ZHENG: WHERE MEMORIES OF TRAVELS GO

    The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT
     
    The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is pleased to announce 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. Where Memories of Travels Go also marks the artist’s first solo museum presentation and the debut of six new paintings on paper. Curated by Amy Smith-Stewart, Chief Curator, the show will be on view in the Museum’s Leir Atrium from September 7, 2023 to January 7, 2024. 
     
    The project title describes 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. 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, 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. 
    The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art
  • Works
  • Exhibitions
  • Press