ZHANG Yi 张一

ZHANG Yi (b.1984) currently lives and works in Beijing, China. She graduated from the Sculpture Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts with a bachelor‘s degree in 2008. From 2012 to 2014, she studied in the United States and obtained a Master’s degree in Art from the New York School of Drawing Painting and Sculpture. From 2016 to 2018, she studied in the UK and obtained a second Master‘s degree in Sculpture from the Slade School of Fine Arts, UCL. Since 2019, she has been teaching at the Studio Three in the Sculpture Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts as a lecturer.

ZHANG Yi grounds her artistic practice in a tactile and generative way of thinking, centering on the interplay between material, body, and time. Through direct contact with materials, she allows traces of roughness, warmth, and form to emerge and transform through the gestures of the body. In the repeated acts of rubbing, sketching, and layering, touch and deeper sensory perception respond to the object, allowing the work to grow organically in the interstices between fingertips and matter, body and space, memory and the present. Her persistent emphasis on action runs through her engagement with multiple media—“Painting is a verb, sculpture is a verb, folding is a verb, filming is a verb.” In this sense, the artist’s body becomes not only an extension of the medium but also a ritual site for the production of meaning.

Her long-term “scavenging” practice further reveals a keen awareness of the material’s vitality and existential condition. Discarded objects—such as wigs, iron wires, horsehair, cotton threads, and baby bottles—are reconfigured into hybrid, parodic structures that intertwine the classical and the contemporary, the personal and the collective. In the states of erosion and fading, time and experience are reactivated; in the substitution of scratches and dents for the sleekness of industrial surfaces, matter breathes with renewed life, giving rise to new poetic forms. Her installations and performances often take on an archival quality of ongoing transformation, turning the exhibition space itself into an organic field where memory and tactility coexist.

In recent years, ZHANG Yi has turned to glass as a central medium, a shift that stems from her painterly sensitivity to light and color. Recognizing the sense of hope and temporal extension contained within light, she juxtaposes the transparency of glass with the diffused softness of paint, weaving together material texture and optical ambiguity. Through this dialogue between matter and vision, her work opens up new perceptual and emotional dimensions.

Recent institutional exhibitions include Wind H Museum (Beijing, 2025), Zhaomu Art Museum (Sanya, 2024), Aimer Art Museum (Beijing, 2024), Jinji Lake Art Museum (Suzhou, 2024), Beiqiu Contemporary Art Museum (Nanjing, 2023), Song Art Museum (Beijing, 2023), Contemporary Art Space (Beijing, 2023), Yuan Museum (Beijing, 2021), Wanhe Art Museum (Beijing, 2019), Aiwei Art Museum (Kunming, 2019), Freud Museum (London, 2017), Jiujiang Art Museum (Jiujiang, 2016), Zhengguan Art Museum (Beijing, 2016), Shanghai Zhengda Art Museum (Shanghai, 2007), etc.