Zhu Xun: With the Bird I’ll Share
Beijing
September 13 - November 15, 2025
Zhu Xun: With the Bird I’ll Share
Zhu Xun: With the Bird I’ll Share
Coming from a background outside both painting and the academy, Zhu approaches the medium with a certain looseness, free from the weight of academic rigor. This allows her to draw directly from her own primal sensations, relying on a subjective power of synthesis rather than strict formal accuracy. Her process begins with resemblances between objects and forms—much like early shamans, who explained the unknown through the visible. Thus, in her paintings, we encounter a pomegranate that recalls a human figure, a mountain that resembles an eye, and a host of symbolic images that oscillate between likeness and ambiguity, between being and becoming.
Her latest works adopt the elevated perspective of a bird, surveying and distilling the relationship between human and nature. Yet this vantage point is also her own: she inhabits a bird-like vision, where details emerge in sharp relief, magnified like through a lens. Nothing escapes notice—subtle shifts and strange anomalies alike become material for her sensitive perception, transforming into a fantastical world that is both outwardly present and inwardly concealed.
If painting is a practice of “seeing,” then Zhu’s looseness gives her sight the freedom of a portal—an ability to slip across thresholds of perception, opening one suspended door after another, each simultaneously closing and unfolding.
ABOUT ARTIST
Zhu Xun, born in Sichuan, Chengdu, in 1989. She now works and lives in Beijing.
In Zhu Xun's works, plants undergo deformation, deconstruction, and reshaping, transitioning from traditional landscapes or still life to become the protagonists of a pictorial narrative. Real-world objects leap into a fantastical dream world: oversized flowers and trees that move and leap as if propelled by inner energy; unidentified spirits concealed in silence, beckoning you into the depths of the unknown. The spirituality inherent in everything awakens the light of our consciousness, evoking memories of a time in our lives or cultural history.
