Beijing–based artist Zhang Zipiao paints lush, enveloping abstractions that find echoes in the anatomies of flora and fauna alike. In the rich hues of viscera, her voluptuous, writhing forms at once evoke meat, bodily fluids, the petals or pistils of flowers, and ripe fruit. Drawing on the work of Chaim Soutine, Francis Bacon, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Jenny Saville, she paints abjection in sweeping gestural marks, such that her canvases hover between abstraction and figuration. However, her contrasting palettes and graphic linework distinctly reflect the influence of digital images and screens.

Born in 1993 in Beijing, Zhang attended the Maryland Institute College of Art and graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. Bacon’s painting Figure with Meat (1954), housed at the school’s Modern Wing, inspired the artist during this period. She has mounted solo exhibitions at Pond Society, Shanghai (2023); LGDR, New York (2023); the Long Museum, Shanghai (2022); Salon 94, New York (2021); White Space Beijing (2020, 2018); Mine Project Gallery, Hong Kong (2019); Star Gallery, Beijing (2017); and Ying Space, Beijing (2015). Recently, her paintings have been included in group exhibitions at Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2023); Gagosian, Hong Kong (2023); Song Museum, Beijing (2022); Pace, Palo Alto, California (2021) and Pearl Art Museum, Shanghai (2020), among others. Her work resides in the collections of the Long Museum, Shanghai, and the Longlati Foundation, Shanghai.