Lijing Zheng

In tempera on wood panel, Zheng paints pale, monumental figures against richly patterned grounds drawn from Chinese folk art. The folk imagery of her childhood in Fujian, deity prints hung above kitchen stoves, paper cuts on windows, shadow puppetry, small rural shrines, and fieldwork among ethnic minority communities constitute what she calls the essential spiritual nourishment of her practice. Zheng reinterprets these traditional visual symbols within contemporary art to make visible how people actually live now.

Her choice of tempera connects her to a lineage from Giotto and the Sienese masters through Andrew Wyeth, yet she redirects the medium toward a fundamentally different pictorial logic. Where the European tempera tradition used line in service of modeling and sacred narrative, Zheng exploits the medium's capacity for fine, assertive brushwork to pursue the principle central to Chinese painting: that line itself constructs form. Her flattened compositions, in which figures intertwine on ornamental grounds amid recurring flames and birds, echo both the spatial conventions of Dunhuang mural painting and the radical compression of Matisse.

Zheng's work has been presented at ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair (2025), Art Shenzhen (2024, 2025), and curated exhibitions in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hangzhou.