Zhang Ruyi

b.1985, Shanghai

Biography
Works

Zhang Ruyi works predominantly in abstract drawing, painting, sculpture and installation. In her practice, sculpture occupies a unique space mediating artifacts, industrial experience and urbanism. Zhang’s artistic practice is centered on the undisclosed relationship between ego consciousness, physical space, and mundane experience. By withholding certain “slices” of time and information of the material employed, the artist is able to capture, replicate, compress, condense or fabricate the materialization of emotions.

Zhang’s work has been presented by K11 Art Foundation (Hong Kong, 2018), Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai, 2018), Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing, 2017), Cass Sculpture Foundation (Chichester, 2016), Sifang Art Museum (Nanjing, 2016), chi K11 art museum (Shanghai, 2016), Shanghai 21st Century Minsheng Art Museum (Shanghai, 2015),. Zhang is the recipient of Prix YISHU 8 Chine 2017 and the participant of the 2017 Glenfiddich Artists in Residence Programme, now in studio residency hosted by Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council at Villa Sträuli, Winterthur.

Zhang currently lives and works in Shanghai.

Individual Plant / 2018 - 2019

Dysmorphic cacti made out of concrete spawn on a tiled pedestal, petrified as a plant specimen. Individual Plant carries forward the artist’s interest in how natural objects are disciplined by their larger environment. The seductive flowers of cacti and succulents are often the only green growing in the scorched desert, their nectre drawing pollinators and feeders from miles away, an oasis in a wasteland sustaining an ecology of its own. Their roots often dig deep into the arid soil, absorbing moisture from the ancient riverbeds underground.

Zhang delineates her clinical gaze on architecture and the city by abstracting and re-positing the geometric construction of this natural object. In Individual Plant – 19, Zhang grafts electric wire into the now concrete of the plant, demonstration the harsh, deeply intrusive infiltration of industry upon nature.

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