Fragments

Ye Qin Zhu’s recent exhibition of paintings: Fragments, presented this winter at Moskowitz Bayse, embody an agitated mind’s wavering attention — humming with fixation and aversion — split between micro and macro moments. Like a dense, excited school of fish darting in and out of sunbeams, Zhu’s marks follow the paintings’ topographies, forming visual currents and traceable passages. At the same time, the eleven continent-shaped paintings are cut from a unified sheet. Similar to the tectonic plates that broke from a single mass eons ago, the drifting pieces have evolved uniquely, and yet inklings of kinship scatter throughout. This series and the works’ respective titles form a poem whose limbs and lines have been separated. Without sequence, their positions are like shards of memory stewing in the mind, a frayed network marked by continual renewal and revision. The works’ supposed brokenness, offset by Zhu’s delicate application of tiny iridescent brushstrokes across the pictures’ surfaces, suggests an attitude of meditative healing and an understanding of painting’s role as a luminous through-line between the estranged.

Indeed, Zhu’s hand makes itself felt throughout these paintings in the thousands of micro-decisions that account for their uncannily seductive, unstinting surfaces. Take for example the widespread found and applied objects — in addition to providing direction to the swarming brushstrokes, the objects serve to link the paintings’ spiritual momenta with the physical world’s concrete trappings. Again, the paintings read like islands of memory, where retained imagery swirls in fast-moving emotional tide pools, assuming deeply subjective and ever-volatile meanings; and, like memory, the paintings’ cohesive whole is hardly discernible and somehow beside the point. Rather, Zhu centers the uncodified relationship between the shards, which comes to form the work’s spiritual architecture.

This intangible architecture electrifies the paintings’ frayed edges, which are lined with a warm reflective color. Moving from the artist’s spirit that animates to the materials that record and contain, Zhu pushes the appearance of objects to convey human ideas of empathy and interdependence. This is felt as the paintings lift from the walls — mounted on thick cleats — without clear orientation as if hovering and reassembling in relation to the viewer, who imagines them pulling together. Or, the pieces may find themselves parsed by the physical architecture’s dimensions, where the edges of space and emotions become relative and negotiable. An uncommon approach to painting, which traditionally asks that each artwork be a discrete object, Zhu’s works embrace the possibility of communion with all things severed and distant. From this, a model of a healing, supportive humanity begins to emerge, with Fragments offering a guide to compassionate living informed, not stifled, by the strangeness of separation.

Zhu received his BFA from The Cooper Union (2010) and his MFA from Yale University (2020) and exhibits his art extensively in New York City and Los Angeles. You can follow his work on Instagram: @yeqin.zhu.

Tectonics are like the earth aspirating: convection's slow and constant in-and-out mounting to the heave of continents breathed in rock. Ye Qin Zhu's paintings are like breath thinking: amorphous contours form and unform; figure and ground incorporate the gasp before knowledge or imagine oneiric landscapes that cry out in a hoarse, yet powerful whisper fragmented poetry from the beginning of time. Unstable land masses always about to expire from memory, Zhu's pictures imagine the scent of collected dirt and objects from a place you've never been.

In merciful river body (2020), a pitted, pearly lung flows wormlike up the flank of a dreamy landscape. Pink-pocked littorals with a topography like aleatory assemblage — the thing doesn't writhe or seethe but settles into a setting that echoes it faintly, brusquely, like the waxing sighs of an unsure couple spooning.

For getting and for giving memory (2020), formed like a figure from Dubuffet, holds in its gut an uncanny assortment of stuff: a tangled mass that might be thread to use but isn't; a calculator half-digested and denatured; pins, rings, shamrocks, and wishbones. All at once they're hapless detritus, the infrastructure of an imagined city, unnatural nourishment, recollections. Zhu's fetal island might regurgitate them, but would that make them clearer?

Each of Zhu's paintings straddle form and recognition — knowing and remembering — like this. Abstractly elemental and timidly personal, they breathe through every texture on their urgent surfaces an unhad memory they'd like desperately to implant.

- Troy Sherman