Online Exhibition “The Story of the Stone” – Zhang Ya

Solo Exhibition of Zhang Ya 张亚

This is an online exhibition on our page at Artsy. Works are available for collection.
Exhibition Period: 20 June – 19 Aug 2023

The exhibition selects Zhang Ya’s series of works in recent years. In these works, she continues to create some geometric patterns. These patterns look like the stones that ancient Chinese literati liked. Stones sometimes occupy the leading role in her paintings and sometimes set off the scene of the story.

Stones have a special symbolic meaning in Chinese culture. The original name of “A Dream of Red Mansions”, one of the four traditional Chinese classics, is “The Story of the Stone”. It is a mortal story told by a spiritual stone. The Art Museum of Harvard University has published a research on the collection of Chinese literati stones by the famous collector Richard Rosenblum: stones can be considered as the “world within the world” of the Chinese, and they are the wisdom and understanding of human and nature from the secular material view.

The stones in her paintings are not only a kind of ancient and modern resonance, but also a kind of abstract decomposition. She uses markers to construct her own unique black-and-white point-line-surface structure bit by bit on the paper. The strokes are as fine as a stone carving knife. At the same time, the use of colored watercolors is free, romantic and unrestrained. The emergence of characters, animals and elves endow complex geometric figures with storytelling.

Zhang Ya won the Excellence Award in the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts Graduation Exhibition. Her work has been exhibited in Iceland, Spain and Switzerland. In 2016, he participated in the Oooit Art International Art Residency Program in the Netherlands.