BFA  Cooper Union, 2010

MFA  Yale University, 2020

 

Ye Qin Zhu was born in Taishan, China (1986), to farmers who met in the factories of Shenzhen city. His family immigrated to NYC in 1990. He grew up in a house with a village-style vegetable garden in the cosmopolitan neighborhood of Sunset Park, Brooklyn. These histories propel him. Their currents—manufacture and gardening, belonging and displacement, anarchy and citizenry, spirit and material—are split modes that fold over, burrowing and resurfacing. Through art-making, Zhu is in conversation with their movements. 

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Drawing from his personal experiences of home-seeking, Zhu finds common ground for solace through image-making and storytelling. Zhu insists on bridging the material and  spiritual; his proposition is that matter, in its manipulation, has an alchemical relation to moods or states-of-mind, and vice versa. Zhu's art depicts how beliefs can travel, become embodied or projected, through internalizing and externalizing, from one body to another—the exchange of mood and matter, and matter and mood. Wounds and remedies may travel these routes. From this root relation, Zhu seeks pathways towards personal, ancestral, and social healing.

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Based in Brooklyn, NY, Zhu is an artist working in painting, public art, and social practice. Zhu has had solo exhibitions at Harkawik Gallery in New York, NY (2022) and Moskowitz Bayse in Los Angeles, CA (2021); an institutional solo at the Andrew Freedman Home in Bronx, NY (2022); exhibited at The Sugar Hill Museum in Harlem, NY (2022-23);  Gavlak Gallery in LA (2023); Galerie Marguo in Paris, France and NADA New York (2022); Harper’s Gallery and James Fuentes in NY (2021); created a tribute art installation for healthcare workers in the Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT (2022); designed a billboard at Kingsgate Project Space in London, UK (2021); and designed two large-scale public art installations: one in Strafford, NH called A Universe and the other in Governors Island, New York titled CONSTELLATION (2021). Zhu is a founding and leading member of the On Memory coalition (2020-present), spearheading the Haven Arts Park, whose mission is to remediate a contaminated land into a healing-garden art-park (recipient of Andrew Mellon Foundation grant, 2022-2023). Zhu has been the subject of interviews for publications in the New York Times, Curator Guide, and Arts Council of Greater New Haven.