Art, Ying Zhu. Exploration, Ephemeral Surprise, and Visual Language

Ying Zhu, awarded a three-month residency at the Bemis, gestures to the spacious studio, the tall windows open to the warm October morning. “I came with a subject in mind, but being here, in this space…” She touches the red brick walls, mottled with faded whitewash. “The walls have so much history—they’re beautiful to me. It’s added to my idea. Now how can I bring the viewer to see what I see.” She erases some of the film from a sheet of drafting paper. With this translucent window, Zhu narrows and frames our focus of the wall. “I see unexpected, ephemeral surprises,” she says. “If you really look, it is there.” Zhu’s fresh appreciation is given to overlooked structures, objects, and detritus of the everyday. The floor and tables hold huge rolls of paper, inviting touch, folding, marking, and hole punch (for that oblique aperture). Carefully broken egg shell halves, their edges inked, are on a sink counter, the floor, and in a shadow box frame on a work table. Picking up some typed pages, Zhu begins to speak of John Dewey, an American philosopher who believed that art is understood through direct experience. “His book [Art as Experience, 1934] is the best,” says Zhu. She and her assistant, Sarah Kolar, are transcribing the entire book on long sheets of thin tracing paper, a process that is transformative in its doing. “These old typewriters [a turquoise Smith Corona] don’t delete or self-correct,” says Zhu, “so we just note the error in red ink.” She plans to wrap the support columns in her studio with the typed pages. The words are, at close view, readable, yet overall the effect is decorative, with the irregular red markings; tracing the spiral of words seems irresistible. As she imagines visitors following the words, it reminds Zhu of the giant prayer wheels in some temples, spun by visitors who seek divine intervention. In this studio however, it is the visitors who circle and thus set in motion their own transformation.  “I’ve always liked to look at things, touch things, and I was always curious,” says Zhu. “Once, when I was about five, I was sitting beside my mother, who was talking on the phone. I notice a little thread at the seam of her pink sweater and wondered what would happen if I pulled that thread…” As she grew older, her curiosity was coupled with drive. “I was of the first generation of China’s one-child policy,” she says, “We had all our parents’ focus.” She took extracurricular classes in art, dance, and English to gain an edge in China’s competitive school system. “My father always wanted me to think in bigger possibilities,” says Zhu. “He set a good example.” Her father, a physician, did research at UNMC, and in 2000, Zhu herself came to Nebraska where she earned a BS at UNO and an MFA at UNL. “Nebraska has a slower pace,” she said. “I can stop and pay attention.” Although she has lived here nearly 12 years, Zhu is still learning American ways through attentive observation and intuitive juxtaposition. “I use language as a metaphor to explore the boundary, the inadequacy, the longing, the adaptation, and the frustration between cultures,” she says in her biographical statement. “Words can be the most direct means of sharing our thoughts. I am trying to take language out of its literal environment and make it speak visually.” In Zhu’s gallery installations, viewers can engage physically with the art, however, the size, complexity, and cost often preclude individuals buying such works. Zhu says that installations can be modified—“Artists are problem solvers.” David Clark and Jason Conrad purchased a sculpture entitled 1979 from her thesis exhibition. “We were blown away by her attention to detail and scope,” said Clark. 1979 is constructed of the numbers from zero to 1979, the year Zhu was born, printed on blue paper, cut out, and glued together in an egg-shape. “I was exploring the idea of numbers being a form of language itself, and how it communicates universally,” explains Zhu in an accompanying statement. “The form seems chaotic from certain perspective, but there is a defined structure, and it is the structure that supports the chaos.” Clark and Conrad say that the concept and diligence of the work, its tactile details, convey an understanding of what it is to be human. The language of art bridges cultural differences, and can bring us to a place of new awareness and appreciation.