Ye Qin Zhu USA, 1986

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.

Drawing from his personal experiences of home-seeking, Zhu finds common ground for solace through image-making and storytelling. His relief paintings of the spirit shattering and then mending (Continuations, 2020) are meditations on how ideas can press onto the body and mind. 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.

Based in Brooklyn, NY and New Haven, CT, Zhu is an interdisciplinary artist with a wide ranging practice that encompasses painting, public art, and social practice. This past year, Zhu has had a solo exhibition at Moskowitz Bayse Gallery in LA, was in group shows at Harper’s Gallery and James Fuentes in NYC, designed a billboard at Kingsgate Project Space in London, UK, 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. Zhu is currently designing and creating the Memorial for Healthcare Workers for Yale–New Haven Hospital and is on the team that spearheaded the New Haven COVID-19 Memorial, working with the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, residents, community and organization leaders. At the heart of Zhu’s work is his painting practice. In the studio is where he digs deep to derive his core values, an important one of which is to find healing. From there he bridges the discipline of painting to all the other forms.