Zifeng Zang: "My Wondergarden"
Muse Art Gallery
52 N 2nd St.
Philadelphia
Showing through Jan. 28, 2025
Seen on Jan. 5, 2025
When I see “cumulonimbus” clouds, I’m reminded of sixth-grade science class. Artist Zifeng Zang, on the other hand, recalls the curriculum of a middle school art course. Can anyone in the class define “fauvism” for us?
Let me borrow this neat New Yorker explanation of the early 20th century art movement: “A Fauve work is so flat that (by a law of optics) it seems to pull the observer toward it instead of receding politely away from him into the distance, in the old Renaissance academic manner.”
Zang’s latest exhibit — a series of gestural florals and interpretive landscapes currently hanging inside Muse Art Gallery — is the opposite of rebellious. Rather, it is a straightforward homage to Henri Matisse, famously remembered as a revolutionary for his iconoclastic rejection of the third dimension and dedication to bold colors blasted straight out of the paint tube.
Zang's piece “Halcyon Cumulonimbus” is a modern lesson on old-school technique. Also known as “anvil clouds,” cumulonimbi are the perfect subjects for fauvist paintings. They’re characterized by their flat tops and signify oncoming thunder; but through typical fauvist fashion, Zang erases the usual grey ambiguity of cloud formations and understands their dynamism instead through vibrant pigment and simple lines. She follows Helen Frankenthaler’s 1950 soak-stain approach to transform acrylic into a high-fluid ink that more closely resembles watercolor, rendering approaching uproar into soft splashes of cobalt and wine. Patches of peach pastel provide a semblance of hope in the face of the storm.
It all harkens back to a time when color was championed by some as a potential savior of humanity. What an idyllic idea — one that is long lost, or easily exploited, in our hyper-saturated, implicitly edited world of today.
Some of Zang's stain-soaked florals.
Still, it’s a style that holds special poignancy because of its purity. I can’t speak on her behalf, but I imagine that’s part of the philosophy behind Zang’s work; “My career as a senior graphic designer and brand manager in China’s 4A agencies and tech giants sharpened my skills in digital imagery and storytelling,” her biography reads.
When I first read that line, I wondered if Zang’s work was an advertisement or endorsement for an antiquated era of artistic thinking. Then I started to consider her contemporary reinterpretation of Matisse as a means of non-exclusive relief from a life of digital strategizing.
It’s a return not to middle school but to something even more elementary.
Zang’s images are, from my personal perspective, technical practices in relaying pretty observations. As spiritual, intellectual and artistic philosophies become ever more muddled by the absurdity of our superficial and chronically online state, I’m finding room for Zang’s straightforward and unironic artist statement: “These pieces celebrate freedom and innovation while inviting viewers to experience the dynamic energy of nature,” she writes. “Through this work, I hope to evoke a sense of wonder and renewal.”
Old school.
