Cynthia Zhang

Lives and works in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China

Artist statement

My practice investigates how perception participates in the emergence of what becomes visible. Working primarily through painting, I approach the image not as a representation of a predetermined subject, but as a field in which colour, material, gesture, memory, and attention continually encounter and transform one another. This inquiry has developed through ABYSS, an ongoing artistic research framework concerned with potentiality, relation, emergence, and return. The abyss, for me, is not an image of darkness or emptiness, but a generative condition: a depth from which forms, sensations, and relations can arise without becoming fixed. My paintings often move between near-obscurity and luminosity. Deep blues, greens, reds, and near-black fields coexist with more chromatic passages, allowing forms to hover between presence and disappearance. I work through repeated looking, intuitive gestures, layering, erasure, and material response, allowing the painting to alter the direction of the work rather than simply execute an initial intention. Increasingly, this practice extends beyond the studio through embodied encounters with water, weather, landscape, and changing environmental conditions. These experiences return to painting not as subjects to illustrate, but as shifts in perception. Across the work, I am interested in painting as a site where the boundary between self and world becomes porous, and where perception itself becomes a form of participation.

Artwork