Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco

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This spring, the Chinese Culture Center (CCC) of San Francisco continues its Xian Rui (Fresh and Sharp) exhibition series with 0-Viewpoint, the first major Bay Area solo exhibition of the work of contemporary artist Stella Zhang. With five dramatic all-white installation works, Zhang, who has worked primarily as a painter in China, Japan and now the Bay Area, makes her first foray into sculptural work to continue her deeply personal and often provocative exploration of identity – as an immigrant, a woman and artist. The exhibition, which is free to the public, is on view April 23 – September 5, 2010 and opens with a reception on April 22 at 6 p.m.

0-Viewpoint is CCC’s third exhibition in the Xian Rui series that features the work of prominent, emerging Chinese-American contemporary artists. “Zhang was born in Beijing in 1965 to a family of artists. Her father, a famous brush painter, pushed her to pursue traditional Chinese arts. She was classically trained, receiving her BFA at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in China. Searching for new ideas, she moved to Tokyo to pursue her MFA at Tokyo Art University and stayed for 12 years. Her work is in the permanent collection of both the Fine Arts Museum in Beijing and the Tan Shin Fine Arts Museum in Tokyo. She arrived in the United States in 2003 and settled four years ago in Palo Alto, CA with her young daughter.”

This continual movement through cultures exerts a powerful force on Zhang’s ongoing artistic search for self that she calls “0”. “What appears in my work is the result of a real individual being shaped by time and again by cultural forces and reaching for new equilibrium,” she says. “In a new place, I must learn again about grief and pain, law and power, questions of identity, behavior and society and all kinds of realities that exist in my new home. Living at the intersection of cultures agitates my work.”