Zhu Ziwei
The Hidden, The Confessional
2025.06.14 - 07.27
Triumph Gallery is pleased to announce the debut solo exhibition of the artist Zhu Ziwei, The Hidden, The Confessional, opening at the gallery on June 14, 2025. This exhibition presents over twenty paintings by Zhu Ziwei between 2023 and 2025. Through these works, we shall witness how the artist draws nourishment from literature, and—guided by her keen sensitivity and the intuitive brushwork honed through years of practice—is refined into a distinctive personal style. We also glimpse the future potential harbored within these brushstrokes, ranging from somber restraint to unbridled expressiveness. Curated by kikizhu, the exhibition will run until July 27, 2025.
As an artist, Zhu Ziwei has demonstrated remarkable promise from the onset of her professional career, emerging as a paragon. Her work possesses a presence that is not overtly assertive yet conveys a profound sense of conviction. Zhu Ziwei seldom depicts ready-made imagery. Instead, her canvases are inhabited by the layered landscapes of memory, association, literary afterimages, and fragmented, symbolic traces of reality. Their sense of volume is diminished, allowing them to float weightlessly across the canvas, generating new meanings in suspension, while that which is obscured continues its discourse in silence. Though often symbolic, these pictorial elements remain rooted in reality; hidden faces and scraped traces imply trauma and discipline. They candidly reflect on the female predicament and point to universal human conditions. The contours of recurring objects and temporal motifs, reminiscent of refrains, remind us of the sharpness and absurdity of existence that perpetually lurk within everyday details.
The strong textual quality of Zhu Ziwei's work is also evident in the obscure lines traversing her canvases. These legible words and illegible markings preserve narrative traces while simultaneously suggesting the boundaries of meaning and interpretation. Furthermore, this "writing," as the trace of bodily movement—whether urgent or wandering—is a gesture of expression. Similarly, the recurring motif of sliced fruit in her work can be seen as a form of self-exposure, reflecting the artist's vulnerability and longstanding interest in flattening pictorial forms.
These works defy simplistic categorization, just as they deliberately avoid straightforward, focal-point compositions. They suggest that the essential act is to step onto the winding path—to engage in the process of discovering meaning within the layered imagery.
As an artist, Zhu Ziwei has demonstrated remarkable promise from the onset of her professional career, emerging as a paragon. Her work possesses a presence that is not overtly assertive yet conveys a profound sense of conviction. Zhu Ziwei seldom depicts ready-made imagery. Instead, her canvases are inhabited by the layered landscapes of memory, association, literary afterimages, and fragmented, symbolic traces of reality. Their sense of volume is diminished, allowing them to float weightlessly across the canvas, generating new meanings in suspension, while that which is obscured continues its discourse in silence. Though often symbolic, these pictorial elements remain rooted in reality; hidden faces and scraped traces imply trauma and discipline. They candidly reflect on the female predicament and point to universal human conditions. The contours of recurring objects and temporal motifs, reminiscent of refrains, remind us of the sharpness and absurdity of existence that perpetually lurk within everyday details.
The strong textual quality of Zhu Ziwei's work is also evident in the obscure lines traversing her canvases. These legible words and illegible markings preserve narrative traces while simultaneously suggesting the boundaries of meaning and interpretation. Furthermore, this "writing," as the trace of bodily movement—whether urgent or wandering—is a gesture of expression. Similarly, the recurring motif of sliced fruit in her work can be seen as a form of self-exposure, reflecting the artist's vulnerability and longstanding interest in flattening pictorial forms.
These works defy simplistic categorization, just as they deliberately avoid straightforward, focal-point compositions. They suggest that the essential act is to step onto the winding path—to engage in the process of discovering meaning within the layered imagery.
Zhu Ziwei
Zhu Ziwei was born in 1997 in Yichang, Hubei Province, China. She attended the Fine Arts School Affiliated to China Central Academy of Fine Arts from 2012-2016, graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts from with a BFA in 2020, and graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts with an MA in 2023, and currently lives and works in Beijing.
Zhu Ziwei’s artistic practice functions as a kinetic textual spectrometer, transmuting literary radiations into undulating celluloid visions. Those latent tremors embedded in feminine écriture—the drifting whalebones from Tokarczuk’s mythoscapes, the convulsive pendulums in Plath’s confessional verse, the sanguine vascular systems within Han Kang’s botanical metaphors—undergo chromatic decryption through her brush, emerging as novelistic climaxes rendered in chromatographic revelations. Thus transfigured, the stratified textures construct archaeological theaters of memory, while abraded brushstrokes index emotional micro-fragments, and ruptured edges expose cognitive rifts of the subconscious.
The artist inherits the Pre-Raphaelites’ devotional approach to literature, weaving pictorial lexicons into constellations of metaphor. As the gaze navigates between abstract color fields and figurative fragments, the warp and weft of cognition quietly spin a new web of significance—Proustian epiphanies materializing like madeleines of memory dissolving into retinal afterglow. These textual stardust particles suspended above pigment swamps constitute both clandestine dialogues with literary precursors and relentless probes into visual potentiality. During protracted moments of contemplation, when symbolic nebulae within the canvas begin their celestial rotation, the conversation between painting and literature persists eternally—yet Zhu Ziwei seeks her own grammatical whispers within the folds of spacetime.
Zhu Ziwei’s artistic practice functions as a kinetic textual spectrometer, transmuting literary radiations into undulating celluloid visions. Those latent tremors embedded in feminine écriture—the drifting whalebones from Tokarczuk’s mythoscapes, the convulsive pendulums in Plath’s confessional verse, the sanguine vascular systems within Han Kang’s botanical metaphors—undergo chromatic decryption through her brush, emerging as novelistic climaxes rendered in chromatographic revelations. Thus transfigured, the stratified textures construct archaeological theaters of memory, while abraded brushstrokes index emotional micro-fragments, and ruptured edges expose cognitive rifts of the subconscious.
The artist inherits the Pre-Raphaelites’ devotional approach to literature, weaving pictorial lexicons into constellations of metaphor. As the gaze navigates between abstract color fields and figurative fragments, the warp and weft of cognition quietly spin a new web of significance—Proustian epiphanies materializing like madeleines of memory dissolving into retinal afterglow. These textual stardust particles suspended above pigment swamps constitute both clandestine dialogues with literary precursors and relentless probes into visual potentiality. During protracted moments of contemplation, when symbolic nebulae within the canvas begin their celestial rotation, the conversation between painting and literature persists eternally—yet Zhu Ziwei seeks her own grammatical whispers within the folds of spacetime.
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Curator
Curator
kikizhu
kikizhu is an independent curator, writer and book designer. She studied at Shenzhen University and Central Academy of Fine Arts. She had worked at Magician Space, The Art Newspaper China and MWOODS Museum. Participated in the curation of exhibitions "David Hockney: Works from Tate Collection (2019), "Chen Tianzhuo: Trance" (2019), "Liang Shaoji: As If" (2018), "Lu Yang: Encephalon Heaven" (2017), etc. She also designed publications for artists such as Richard Tuttle, Paul McCarthy, Nicolas Party, and Liang Shaoji. Continuing to produce art and visual culture content as an individual, her areas of interest are: image research, personal history and immigrant culture, artists' books and paper reading.