ZHU HONG
Zhu Hong (born 1975, Shanghai, China) is a visual artist based in France, working primarily across drawing, painting and spatial installations. She lives and works in the Nantes region in France, where she has developed a sustained practice centred on perception, light and everchanging nature of images. Her works are held in the public collections of the Artothèque de Nantes, the Artothèque de La Roche-sur-Yon, the Artothèque d’Angers, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, the Musée Ziem, the Musées de Sens, and the FRAC Pays de la Loire collection.
The artist studied at the Shanghai University Institute of Fine Arts (1993–1997), where she received her foundational training in painting. After relocating to France, she completed the Diplôme National Supérieur d’Expression Plastique (DNSEP) with honours at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Dijon (2004–2007), further refining her practice in oil painting and drawing.
Zhu Hong’s work has been widely exhibited in France and internationally, including at the Musée d’arts de Nantes, the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Dijon and La Roche-sur-Yon, the Centre d’Art de Pontmain, the Musée Ziem, the Château du Grand Jardin, and The Merchant House (Amsterdam). In 2022, her work was presented at the Asia NOW contemporary art fair in Paris. She has participated in residencies at institutions such as Le Lieu Unique (Nantes), the Pôle international de la Préhistoire (Les Eyzies), and Schloss Balmoral (Germany). One of her installations was acquired by the Loire-Atlantique Department through the French public art programme “1% artistique”.
Her visual language often oscillates between figuration and abstraction, where forms appear and dissolve within atmospheric fields of colour and light. Rather than describing a fixed subject, her works stage the process of emergence itself, focusing on how images come into being and how they are perceived over time. She is particularly interested in the concepts of variability, temporality and transformation. A central axis of her work is the representation of water and light. Using highly diluted Chinese ink, coloured pencils, oil paint and photographic sources, she constructs images that emerge through layering, repetition, and controlled instability. Chance plays a structural role in her process — particularly through water stains, optical disruptions and transfers between media, which are then reworked through drawing.
A particular focus of her research lies in the variability of perception and the ways a work reveals itself according to the viewer’s distance. At close range, individual lines, marks, and the material texture of the surface become visible. From afar, details recede, giving way to an overall atmosphere shaped by transparency, light effects, and shifting visual impressions. Painting engages a similarly sensory dimension while relying on a radically different gesture. Using brushes, Zhu Hong creates broad, energetic marks capable of capturing and preserving the momentum of movement. Chance plays a fundamental role in her method. Optical distortions, the interaction of different media, stains, brushstrokes and splashes complicate the material presence of the work and disrupt the sense of photographic precision. Zhu Hong’s artworks consistently propose a slowed and contemplative experience of observing, often rooted in a specific context. Her practice continually questions perception, where the image is understood as a shifting, temporal event rather than a fixed representation.
In the Lumière reflet series, Zhu Hong turns to photography as a means of capturing reflections, light, its glare and iridescence. When light meets water, the image seems to diffract: colours multiply, and the space of perception becomes infinitely variable. Here, water functions not simply as a background, but as a mirrored, shimmering surface that reveals individual forms and fragments.
After selecting a number of photographs, the artist returns to them through drawing, transforming the fleeting instant captured by the camera into a patient, extended gesture. This process — from recording to reinterpretation — unfolds through the repeated layering of fine vertical strokes. Gradually, the image loses its material definition and approaches abstraction. As the contrast softens, the original image dissolves into flashes of light.
For the first time in the Lumière reflet series, the artist extends her painterly practice into a site-specific three-dimensional installation. Composed of numerous glass “pebbles” that shimmer in the light, the work expands beyond the canvas and unfolds throughout the gallery space.
In the Vibration series, Zhu Hong reflects on the limits of perception. Within a precise compositional structure — marked by an almost mathematical clarity and a subtle musicality — she allows space for chance. The image dissolves into vibrations of light. The surface of the paper is filled with muted, low-contrast tones; at times, this calm chromatic field is interrupted by “drops” of water on a glass surface, which overlay the drawn graphic lines, introducing multiple layers of reading and destabilising perception. The viewer’s gaze seems to pass through the image, searching for focus and a stable point of clarity. The artist turns to the observation of everyday scenes that gradually dissolve into fields of light, reaching a state where they become nearly indistinguishable and escape full visual grasp.
The works from Zhu Hong’s Nuage series are inspired by photographs of the Loire River, where clouds appear only through their reflections on the water’s surface. Rather than adopting the familiar upward gaze toward the sky, the artist chooses a viewpoint from above, displacing conventional perspective and introducing a subtle sense of distance and estrangement. Water functions here both as a filter and as a surface of inscription: a medium that transforms and temporarily holds an ever-changing landscape.
The photographs that serve as the starting point for these paintings do not depict clouds in any direct sense, yet they continually evoke the idea of a cloud. In doing so, Zhu Hong questions the reliability of perception itself: does what we see truly correspond to what we believe we are seeing?
The Éclat series of paintings on wood develops the idea of the fragment, drawing inspiration from the engravings in Alberto Magnelli’s Album de la Ferrage. The singular forms of the paintings emerge from a process of isolation and extraction from the artist’s prints. These fragments are then arranged on the wall in a way that allows them to unfold and respond to one another.
The Éclat series is painted from photographs of shadows collected by Zhu Hong. Observing shadows detached by contrast on walls, as if a layer deposited on a flat surface, she notes: “light paints better than I do”. Light cuts across surfaces, simplifying and reuniting colours and volumes, inventing new forms. It produces a shifting, ephemeral image on an often flat and empty surface.
At the Musée Magnelli in Vallauris, Zhu Hong continues her exploration of light, which she describes as an “absent presence”. To fix the fragment of a brief apparition, to record time and void, is for her to open a space conducive to contemplation.
Part of the works were produced during the artist residency at the Musée Magnelli, museum of ceramics in Vallauris, with the support of the DRAC PACA.
The E. Space series continues Zhu Hong’s exploration of the surface and depth of drawing. Created during an artist residency in Nantes in 2021, the series of relief works evokes three-dimensional labyrinths or suspended staircases. Within these compositions, forms shift, extend, fragment or appear to float in emptiness.
The folded and perforated drawing is set against a background that itself remains elusive, escaping perception. The different surfaces interact with one another, creating the impression that the figures are suspended in space. According to Zhu Hong, this effect reflects the uncertainty surrounding the future of culture and architecture when confronted with the overwhelming scale of nature.
The drawings in the Tache series are made from photographic images stained with water. Water stains themselves become the very subject of the work.
“One day, water fell onto an inkjet digital print I was using. The stain revealed a much more saturated intensity of colours that detached from the image and settled at the edge of the water’s passage. At the same time as this revelation, the water stain created a fading and a recession of the image. It was from this event that the idea for the series was born: to fix, through the insistence and endurance of repetitive drawing, the temporary and elusive nature of chance”, the artist explains.
“Among other experiments, extremely diluted Chinese ink, bordering on watercolour, is one of the materials I prioritise in my research on drawing. I appreciate and make use of its random and uncertain nature, which is difficult to control. The superimposition of pencil lines and ink stains allows the readability of the image to be blurred. Thus, rather than the image itself, my research focuses on its emergence — the process through which it comes into being. For the image to fully reveal itself, it requires a period of observation, which becomes an invitation to contemplation”.
The contemporary photographs used for the series of drawings come from the collection of the Museum of La Roche-sur-Yon. The works are created in several stages. Deliberate chance — the action of water — remains an unpredictable intervention that makes the original subject gradually recede. Thus, the figurative image approaches abstraction. Water here is both destructive — in deforming and erasing the original image — and creative, producing a new image with an accumulation of unfamiliar colours and forms.
From a distance, the artworks from the Gouttes series invite contemplation of a misty, rainy landscape. As one approaches, the landscape gives way to countless raindrops resting on a pane of glass. The details of the image gradually emerge: colours become distinguishable, revealing colours, small vertical pencil strokes and, finally, the materiality of the drawing itself.
The works capture the entire process of visual perception — from a first casual glance to intent observation. The surface appears obscured by raindrops: as the gaze focuses on the landscape, the glass dissolves, yet the droplets continue to distort, conceal and reveal details.
The works are built up in multiple layers of coloured pencil laid over a silvery or blue-toned wash. The working process, slow and meticulous, is akin to that of a plotter. The gesture can take on a mechanical quality in its repetition. Paradoxically, this extended duration of making serves the representation of a fleeting instant, when the glass collects raindrops and the landscape is reshaped by passing rain. A moment later, the pattern of the raindrops has changed, and so has the landscape, but the artistic gesture preserves it in time.
Paysage is a series of drawings made with hard pencil over fields of ink stains, appearing to float in emptiness. The works are based on photographs of flint stones taken during an artist residency in Les Eyzies-de-Tayac in France. Through a shift in scale, these fragments become an ambiguous mineral landscape. Focusing on representations of millennia-old objects becomes for the artist a way of granting them a different temporality, distinct from the one through which they are usually perceived.
This Document series is based on parchments discovered in the archives of the city of Flers. The content of the documents has been carefully erased in order to foreground their material form, folds and traces of time. Ink stains and pencil lines overlap, giving the image a sense of fluidity while also evoking the passage of time.
