Student creates surrealist self-portraits that reflect her Chinese heritage

As a first-generation immigrant, Zhu said, these images and stories represent “a way for me to reconnect.”

When she came to the United States at seven years old, Zhu prioritized fitting in at school in North Carolina, where she lived for a year before moving to Cupertino, California.

“At the time, I was very focused on not being Chinese,” she said. “I feel like I robbed myself of something that I had, and now in creating art I’m trying to regain it.”

“My heritage impacts who I am and how other people see me. It may impact what kind of artwork people expect me to create.”

A childhood Chinese art teacher influenced Zhu’s work as well. The “old school” instructor made her draw at easels for hours, rarely giving compliments. She now uses paper and graphite to make realistic drawings on paper, but mixes in atypical loose pigments such as pots of eyeshadow—softer than pastels, and good for adding a flush of color to the skin.

“He taught me a lot of discipline, to really love creating, and really good technique,” Zhu said.

Her imagination is often sparked by a fleeting image, a time of year, stray words or other art. The title of Sir Frederic Leighton’s 1895 oil painting Flaming June—depicting a sleeping woman in a billowing orange dress—reminded Zhu of her birth month, prompting her to draw a self-portrait in a similar style.

Surrealists like Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo also inspire her, as do self-portraits by artists such as René Magritte, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Frida Kahlo. Surrealists, Zhu said, often dealt with the idea of the impossibility of seeing, which connects directly to her scholarship.

“Magritte stated, ‘We always want to see what is hidden by what we see,’ and that is incredibly insightful in terms of sensory neuroscience,” Zhu said. “I’m fascinated by the neuroscience of visual perception, precisely because of the constructed nature of reality conveyed to us through our senses.”

In addition, Zhu looks to late Chinese photographer Ren Hang and other contemporary Chinese artists. The works of those still living in China, she said, help her understand that her heritage doesn’t only take place in past tense.

This fall, Zhu will teach a course at the School of the Art Institute on light and vision, drawing on her work in the neuroscience field and her lifelong training as an artist.

“If you know how vision and light work,” she said, “and how artists have been exploiting our perceptual abilities and the science of how we see things for a very long time, you have a more full understanding of what it means to appreciate visual art.”

—This story was adapted from the UChicago Arts blog.