Zitong Zhu

Born 1994

Lives and works in New York and Shanghai

Zitong Zhu is a visual artist. Her works are primarily oil paintings and photography. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the United States. Since 2017, she has participated in group exhibitions in the United States, China, and South Korea. She was also rated as one of the noteworthy Rising Star Class of 2019 by Saatchi Art. Recently, her research project interrogates this under-investigated intersectionality between artist filmmaking and contemporary art, which has gained increasing popularity in China in recent years.

Also, Zitong’s previous work is a site-specific project — ART· ifice 909. ART· ifice 909 is about optical illusion, humor and tricking the perception of the viewer.  This body of work is a site-specific project using the existing space and architectural elements in my studio to create two-and-a-half-dimensional photographs. Her goal is to encourage the viewer to discover alternative realities through the strategic use of illusion and perspective. These are realities that they can decide to accept, or not. Each work is created using a different logic including time, space, location, relocation, scale, reconstruction, and deconstruction. This body of work is her take on Trompe L’oeil, a traditional painting technique that uses realistic imagery to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects exist in three dimensions.

Zhu’s work has been featured in School of Visual Arts 20/20 Catalogs, curated by Hitomi Iwasaki, and has been exhibited at galleries and online including SVA Gramercy Gallery, cloyPARLOR Pop-up Show, Magic Plastic Lounge in Satellite Art Fair, and Hongik Museum of Art in Seoul.