PING ZHENG: SOFT INTERFERENCE

Artist Reception: Saturday, January 31, 2–5 PM

 

Soft Interference presents a new series of oil stick works on paper by Ping Zheng, following her 2024 exhibition Nature’s Canopy at Seven Sisters. In these works, Zheng continues her investigation of landscape as a site of perception and interiority. Through varied mark-making and shifting chromatic fields, she constructs images that hover between observed nature and remembered experience.

 

The exhibition title, Soft Interference, refers to moments of subtle overlap and disturbance, when energies meet and alter one another without rupture. In Zheng’s work, interference becomes a way of thinking about perception itself: how memory, emotion, and environment occupy the same space and quietly reshape what is seen.

 

Zheng’s practice belongs to a long continuum of artists who have approached nature as a site of spiritual and perceptual inquiry and as a structure for thinking about time, longing, refuge, and transformation. Drawing on ancient Chinese landscape painting and, inadvertently, on twentieth- and twenty-first-century visionary practices, her work treats landscape as a field of energetic resonance and balance, advancing Zheng's exploration of it as a psychological and constructed space. The resulting works are richly atmospheric and exist at the edge of the cinematic, unfolding rather than forming a fixed or resolved scene. These transportive works channel natural balance alongside the narrative potential of a fairy tale.

 

A recurring motif throughout the exhibition is the paper plane. The form originated from a poem Zheng wrote about her parents, in which their memory was described as “wrapped in crumpled paper, like multiple drafts thrown in the trash.” From this image, Zheng imagined the page folding itself into a plane, transforming something discarded into something that moves. As she writes, “A paper plane becomes the human soul trying to mail itself to eternity… launched toward a future it may never reach, yet still stubbornly pointing toward it.”

 

The plane functions as a site of tension: fragile and temporary, yet geometrically rigid and historically resonant. Its triangular form echoes pyramids and monoliths associated with permanence and spiritual aspiration, while remaining a child’s toy that can transform into an ascending space vehicle. Within this contradiction, ascent and descent, innocence, power, and vulnerability coexist. The paper planes act as gestures of release, sending off past concerns while orienting toward new horizons. Folded into her landscapes, they balance memory and forward motion, propelling both hope and curiosity.

 

At its core, Soft Interference reflects Zheng’s belief in art as a lifelong practice grounded in attention, meaning, and the quiet pursuit of depth and acceptance. Her use of enduring forms positions painting as a way of living deliberately within complexity.

 

Ping Zheng (b. 1987, Zhejiang, China) holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA from University College London, Slade School of Fine Art. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including a recent group exhibition at Asia Society Texas, Houston, and is currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Public collections include the Cleveland Clinic Art Program; Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection; JPMorgan Chase & Co.; University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Pérez Art Museum Miami.