Necessary Evil

Zhang’s art practice tends to present us with dichotomies and contradictions – Eastern motifs and Western pop styles, dark themes presented in a joyful palette. Over the past year, the artist has experienced her own extremes of highs and lows. Working under lockdown and dealing with chronic pain, she also was made uncomfortably aware of the anti-Asian sentiments that had been circulating in Australia since Covid-19 took hold.

Fortunately for the Chinese-Australian artist, this was counterbalanced by a whirlwind of success in the corporate and public sector. In 2020-21, Zhang held a small survey show at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne with a work purchased for its contemporary collection. The project was sponsored by MECCA, Australian cosmetic and beauty brand giant, which also featured the artist’s designs in a limited-edition campaign of packaging

throughout its Australian stores. For Zhang, this project was a means of making her art more accessible.

“Most people don’t have thousands of dollars for an artwork,” she says. “So a lot of people ended up keeping the packaging and some of them put the tissue paper print in a frame or cut out the painting from the gift bags… Some people even turned it into necklaces and book- marks. This is how art should be. I’m so happy about that aspect of accessibility.”

Zhang’s unique symbolism and imagery has developed over years of research. She graduated from UNSW Art & Design in 2016 with an Honours and Masters degree in Fine Arts. Growing up in Western Sydney as a daughter of Chinese migrants in the 1990s, Zhang was a self-confessed teenage Emo and consciously rejected her Chinese identity. It was only years later, as a freshly minted art school graduate that she engaged in two residencies in China, first in Beijing in 2016 and the following year in Chongqing, that she became fascinated with traditional Chinese mythology.

Her current series of works focus more on Chinese compositions than Western imagery. Her large-scale paintings feature chrysanthemums, peonies and lotus flowers – Chinese symbols of purity. However, look closer and the faces of viscous beasts, jagged claws and hellish flames start to emerge from the background. Zhang explains that these symbols come from Chinese folklore, particularly its version of hell, known as Diyu. Although brought up as a Christian, she became fascinated by the Eighteen Levels of Hell in Chinese mythology, each with its own form of punishment and atonement.

“I find looking at this dark stuff quite joyous because it’s me learning, it’s me discovering,” she says. Spooky symbols from these Hell realms are offset by her love of Nianhua or Chinese New Year, with its popular depictions of cherubic babies, golden fish and peach blossoms, denoting abundance and longevity. Zhang’s appreciation for Chinese New Year led to the City of Sydney commissioning her to create public sculptures for its Chinatown New Year celebrations – Monkey Tower in the Sydney Opera House forecourt in 2019 and a series of Lunar New Year Moon Gates in 2020.