Ruyi Zhang

Sculptor and painter Zhang Ruyi’s works address the cumulative effects of urban development and industrialization on the individual, the public, nature, and the built environment. Zhang’s graphic paintings and installations create and inscribe spaces with layers of grids that variously evoke ceramic home tiles or an urban planner’s layout of multi-block developments; these geometries suggest order but also a detached indifference toward the malleability and interchangeability of private and public spheres of living. Zhang takes concrete and other materials from demolition sites and reimagines them in organic forms that resemble cacti, connecting them back to the natural world. In these hardy desert plants that ration and hoard their resources under defensive exteriors, Zhang finds metaphorical counterparts to contemporary geopolitical postures: everyone with their spines out, primed for survival.