YE QIN ZHU

BFA  Cooper Union, 2010

MFA  Yale University, 2020

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Ye Qin Zhu was born in Taishan, China (1986), to farmers who met in the factories of Shenzhen city. The Zhu family immigrated to NYC in 1990. He grew up in a house with a lush village-style backyard garden in the cosmopolitan streets of Sunset Park, Brooklyn. These histories propel him; their currents—manufacture and gardening, belonging and displacement, spirit and material—create a forest of split roads that fold over, burrowing and resurfacing. Through artmaking, Zhu engages in a visceral dialogue with their movements.

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Zhu adapts painting’s contemporary tendency to capture abstract and representational themes of identity, spirituality, and emotion, while fusing relief elements belonging to the domain of sculpture—which is more based in material reality. Zhu’s layered use of found and crafted objects forms dense aggregates of intersecting stories. His use of material is painterly, attuning to their properties of color, texture, and expression; they are also literal, with the objects themselves addressing the realities of globalization and consumption, legacies of colonization, and the intimacy of sentimental objects.

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His explorations demand a relentless connection between the tangible and the intangible. Zhu's art depicts how beliefs can seed, sprout and travel, become embodied or projected, through internalizing and externalizing, from one body to another. The exchange of mood and matter, matter and mood—a cosmic shuffle of polar energies. Wounds and remedies may travel along these splitting routes, and Zhu’s art serves as material vessels for their migration. 

 

At the core of Zhu's creative universe lies a profound understanding, that beliefs are nomads—transmitting, embodying, and projecting through the intricate web of human connections. And the built environment surrounding us, down to our bodies, are sites of transmission. We hold the capacity to transform, or be transformed by, the institutions that hold us. From this primal connection of migrating ideas and bodies, Zhu maps out pathways toward personal, ancestral, and societal healing.

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Based in Brooklyn, NY, Zhu is an interdisciplinary artist focused in painting, public art, and social practice. Zhu has had solo exhibitions at DIMIN Gallery (2023) and Harkawik Gallery (2022) in New York, NY, and Moskowitz Bayse (2021) in Los Angeles, CA; a comprehensive solo at the Andrew Freedman Home in Bronx, NY (2022); exhibited in group shows at The Sugar Hill Museum in Harlem, NY (2022-23);  Gavlak Gallery in LA (2023); Galerie Marguo in Paris, France and NADA New York and Miami (2022, 2023); Harper’s Gallery (2023, 2021)and James Fuentes (2021) in NY; 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 Haven Arts Park (2020-2023), 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.