About

Christine Zheng (she/her) is an artist, storyteller, and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. She received a BA in Studio Art and English Literature from Carleton College.

Instagram | chriszheng135 [at] gmail [dot] com

Statement

How can we regain wholeness from the shrapnel of stuff
churning our infinite desires?

I grew up poring through magazines, collecting cut-outs of glossy advertisements and fashion spreads, longing for the opulence that these images evoked. An evolution of this childhood fixation, my practice explores how the hyper-altered images that surround us shape our desires and dreams.

Working primarily in painting, collage, and printmaking, I simultaneously revel in and probe the seduction of commercial imagery and material culture. I start in collage, culling images from consumer-targeted media and rearranging them in oneiric realms where fragments teem to life. I coax complexity and energy from this imagery, which has shoved objects and ideas into a sterilized unreality, by drawing forms and arrangements from natural phenomena (water, geology, landscapes) and narratives of life (play, sex, growth). I emphasize material’s agency and inseparability from humans by rendering collaged imagery in brushstrokes of varied opacities and tempos. I view painting as an antidote to the deadening ways mass media is produced and consumed. Like commercial imagery, painting is seductive and delicious. However, it’s also complex. My work explores ways to to unlock and stretch the paradoxes of human experience—chaotic and meditative, repulsive and delicious, fast and slow.

I seek to articulate what comes before, during, and after desire, investigating its many forms—dangerous, wistful, unconscious, force fed to us by algorithms—and ways it keeps us tethered to dissipated pasts and robust futures. I implicate myself as an addict of accumulation while investigating what made me this way, exploring alternatives to the overconsumption and disembodiment fueled by neoliberal capitalism and digital transmutation. My practice tests the boundlessness of fantasy, illuminating what keeps us tethered to objects while inviting engagement with more-than-physical realms.