Leah Ke Yi Zheng

David Lewis is pleased to present Leah Ke Yi Zheng. Zheng’s debut solo exhibition features fourteen new paintings including a double-sided painting on translucent silk on hand made stretchers that are installed in the street-facing window.

Zheng was born and raised in Wuyishan, China where from an early age she apprenticed in traditional Chinese painting techniques. Zheng continued her art education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago developing an exquisite practice that combines contemporary Chinese painting methods with a deep knowledge of post war avant-garde European painting.

The artist’s process begins by making shaped stretchers out of woods such as mahogany, purple heart wood, and wenge wood. This produces an intimately irregular, slightly uncanny object: a parallelogram that deviates from the rectangle. She then stretches a range of silks over these unique shapes, which are as light, translucent, and evanescent as the wood is heavy and warm.

Recurring motifs or forms in her work include curtains and folds, the fusée (an engine of time), and the machine in general. These elements are often combined with phantasmagorical figures and Baroque particularity. Across the development of the works, these forms undergo changes: they transform, substitute, alter, and deviate, raising questions on repetition and difference. When forms and variation collide, the gradual process of revealing occurs: the semiotics of hiding, veiling, unfolding, and the coexistence of silence, stillness, and living energy.

"I think of my studio practice having an indirect relation to Hilma af Klint, Blinky Palermo, Kerstin Brätsch, Fra Angelico, Marcel Duchamp, Jorge Luis Borges, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Byung-Chul Han, and César Aira. But my paintings tend not to refer and are not in service of something else; they are individual and discrete and are engaged through their solitude, as we are as individuals, at the limits of knowledge."

—Leah Ke Yi Zheng

Leah Ke Yi Zheng (b. 1988) attended Xiamen University (China) and has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Zheng has had solo exhibitions at 4th Ward Project Space (Chicago), The Arts Club of Chicago, Caffé Centrale (Monte Castello di Vibio, Umbria), and was included in the group show A Mimetic Theory of Desire at David Lewis in 2022.