August 18, 2026
Jeana Zhenyu Zhang spoke with IMPULSE Magazine ahead of her forthcoming solo exhibition at VillageOneArt, discussing her training in Chinese ink traditions, her studies in the United States, and her search for a painting practice that draws on both, work the magazine described as “always in pursuit of alchemy.”
Born in Dalian, China, and now based in New York, Zhang began studying calligraphy and ink painting as a child, then pursued oil painting at the California College of the Arts and mixed media at Parsons School of Design. In the interview, conducted by Laura Luo, she described that education as a search for a medium capable of carrying both traditions forward rather than treating them as separate systems.
Zhang traced part of that search back to her secondary-school training in China, where entrance-exam preparation drilled students in figure drawing, gouache still life, and quick sketching, a standardized system she said taught useful technique but tended to flatten individual ways of seeing. That growing distance from the system, she said, was part of what led her to study abroad.
Zhang discussed her current material process in some detail: she paints with metallic acrylics that change color, from gold to green or from silver to violet, when exposed to hot water, a chemical shift she uses to echo the layered, boundary-driven quality of ink painting on canvas. Working with the canvas tilted on the ground, she lets pigment pool and find its own edges before adding further layers of ink and paint in response.
She also spoke about calligraphy as an ongoing daily practice that precedes her painting sessions, describing the ritual of preparing ink, paper, and mat as a way of settling her mind before she begins to paint. Painting itself, she said, tends to bring out a wider and more charged range of emotion by comparison, from anger and heartbreak to fervor and euphoria.
Asked about ink painting’s position within China’s broader art history, Zhang agreed that the period following the Cultural Revolution left literati, and later neo-literati, painting caught between reconnecting with historical tradition and catching up with an increasingly globalized art world, a tension she believes still separates traditional and contemporary ink practitioners into largely distinct circles today.
Recurring subjects in her recent paintings, knotted tree branches, withering lotus leaves, beading water, reflect a broader interest in natural forms caught mid-change. Asked about her current body of work, Zhang pointed to tree structures, and the way a wounded tree scars and heals, as a new area of focus, drawn in part to the vein-like structure of branches and the way fresh and withered lotus leaves reveal their vein patterns differently over time.
Read the full interview at IMPULSE Magazine. For inquiries regarding works by Jeana Zhenyu Zhang, please contact info@villageoneart.com.