Leah Ke Yi Zheng never intended to be an artist. Growing up in China, she studied with a traditional painter, who taught her calligraphy and how to copy the old masters. But when it came time to choose a career, she decided to become a judge. Although unfamiliar with United States history and the American legal code, she took her LSAT in Hong Kong and enrolled in law school in Indiana. Disenchanted, she dropped out during her second year, and her mother urged her to pursue a business degree.
“I locked myself away for three days, smoking and drinking,” Zheng said. “I told myself: ‘Either I will die, or I’ll make a choice I can commit to.’” She applied to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago shortly after.
That decision is paying off. In January, Zheng opened her second solo exhibition with Mendes Wood DM in New York, and she’s preparing upcoming shows in Vienna and at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, where she now lives. On the day I visited the studio she shares with her partner on the city’s industrial Near West Side, she was fussing with a small-scale model of the Vienna gallery, trying to envision the exhibition’s flow. Marbles were piled on the floor, evidence of her young son. Almost everywhere I looked were artists’ monographs and heavy reads by Barthes, Foucault, and Dostoyevsky.
While law and art may seem incompatible, the impulses behind both coalesce in Zheng’s works, in which rational, even schematic, compositions coexist with more instinctive gestures. Untitled (fusée in its flesh), a 2023 painting made as part of a series of machine works begun three years earlier, sets disembodied cylinders and gears against an abstracted backdrop, bisected by bands of color that might be mechanical themselves. Many of the machines Zheng depicts are fusees—the pulleys in antique watches and clocks—while others are fictional devices of obscure purpose. In No.45 (2024), from another major series inspired by the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, horizontal bars form visual interludes that are at once exacting and ineffable.
Leah Ke Yi Zheng: no. 42, 2024.
Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brussels, Paris, New York
“Life is so full of data and information today,” Zheng said. “The spiritual capacity I explore interrupts that data-and-information loop.” One technique for interrupting the loop is to confound viewers about the very nature of painting. Zheng uses Chinese silks instead of canvases, attached to custom stretchers made of mahogany, cherry, and other varieties of wood. Nearly all her paintings are irregularly shaped. She describes her works as “uncanny things” that pervert our notion of a painting’s two-dimensionality. The transparency of silk makes front and back, surface and depth simultaneous in Zheng’s work, especially when hung in front of a light source, which lends the paintings a diffuse iridescence that can mimic watercolor.
“Traditional Chinese painting was a dead end,” Zheng said. “My work seeks to reinvent or edit it,” partly by combining ancient materials with the formal provocations of the Western avant-garde.
Risk—conceptual and physical—underpins her approach. Silk is an unforgiving medium, any accident turning permanent. But Zheng is unflustered. “There are no mistakes,” she said. “Every mark is truthful. Every mark is authentic.”
