by Ofelia Zurbia Betancourt
This title comes from one of Jie Zhang’s poems in 2021, which published in a Chinese version on a poetry magazine. It is about time, the way of coming out of a flower, which is a sense of metonymy to any kind of growth.
Jie Zhang is a painter & writer based in London the Koppel Project studio. Four
Garden 152x121cm oil on canvas 2025
years ago, searching for new changes and some British writers and artists influenced on her brought her to the UK after many years of doing art in her home country. Her practice combines painting, poetry and roots in her growing up experience. Living in a garden with grandparents in childhood, and then changing dwelling places many times since being a kid, it gave her strong perception to the nature and sensitivity to her existence. At some point, the conflict between society rules and spiritual state made her exploring the truth of world. The worldviews from Buddhism and nature science helped her understand this material world, and healed up, which often reflected in her poems and paintings later on.
Her voice is a quiet doubt to self identity, a slow and repeated narrative to spiritual freedom under the unchanging universal human condition. The group exhibition featured her work ‘Garden’, one of a series of works centring on the garden theme and starting from 2021 to now, it reflects a common prospect without geographic boundaries, time or definition, embodies the inner softness and strength
throughout her growth, or in other words, the contradictory sides underlying every phenomenon.
Thorns and flowers, darkness and light, vulnerability and life force…within these elements she has given up the forms of pure abstract or realistic, figurative or landscape. It just serves for her understanding and literary interpreting. From my point of view, the plants, flowers, abstract landform in her works are a kind of visualised metaphors borrowed from her reality, the way she experienced and felt.
Dense Forest 60x40x2 pieces oil on canvas 2025
The garden, as a symbolised place, a string linked past, present and future, caught the inherent features of this sensible world, mystery of nature, self-reflections, circle of life, has built spaces for those faded away but still existing. Just like the way we are growing, the wrinkles coming out, the waves layered and layered.
Jie Zhang(b.1989 China), a painter&writer based in London, who’s practice spans painting and poem writing, and centres on inner landscapes shaped by memory, displacement, and spiritual reflection. Her work has been exhibited in China and the UK, and is held in private collections, her writings have been published on Chinese newspapers and magazines.
