Goings on About Town, Art: Ping Zheng

These small, beguiling oil-stick drawings find an ideal context in Kristen Lorello’s vest-pocket gallery. Zheng, who was born in China and now lives in New York, is inspired by nature; the subjects of her exacting, textured, and highly stylized compositions include night skies, distant hills, and geometric trees. “Fireflies in My Backyard” and “In the Blue Light” both feature rippling grounds and central symmetrical forms resembling ghosts, tents, or portals. Elsewhere, mysterious biomorphic peaks and blobs are foils to glyphlike crescent moons. At times, the artist appears to make unabashed allusions to children’s art: in “Sun + Flower,” a perfect rainbow above a rectangle of blue water bridges the gap between two green mountains, as a blazing orb in a peach-colored sky sprouts spiky yellow petals. Thanks to its confident, meticulous simplicity, the weird picture works.