The First Gate

Ji Zou is a Hmong Chinese American artist who works primarily with painting and video art. Pulling from embodied experiences, dreams, and spiritual rituals, Ji Zou addresses themes of race, gender, sexuality, and digital identity. Through smooth, metallic renderings of form, translated from digital origins, Ji Zou’s work holds a mirror to contemporary culture. The screaming spirit escapes a body bound by illusions of a biological clock; lovers evaporate within the embrace of each other; a dripping hand transforms the human skin into that of a metal demon.

Questioning the tangible ways in which power moves through constructions of identity, Ji Zou examines how modern Western ideologies govern our relationship to the self, to the erotic, and to liberation. Ji Zou also draws from feminist and queer theory, neuroscience, shamanic ritual, psychoanalytic theory, and marginalised histories to inform their artistic practice.

In a 2024 interview, with Rubén Palma, for Overstandard (‘Ji Zou on The Erotic, The Digital, and The Subconscious’), Ji Zou explained her interest in the erotic (as seen through the filters of feminism and queer theory):

My parents practice polygyny so my Chinese dad has two Hmong wives. This happened when I was 12 so it was hard for me to process it. I think it’s still challenging as it clashes so much with the American liberal ideals about gender equality and ethnic equality. However, it challenged me to view the world through various cultures and perspectives at once which helped me to develop a more nuanced perspective and one that resists binary modes of thought and morality which I think is extremely pervasive today amongst the right and left and engenders division within communities. My work often feels like a dialogue with itself that is full of contradictions. Sometimes the contradictions exist in one piece and sometimes the pieces take one stance but contradict the other pieces. I’m also examining the space of the erotic and its relationship to gender, labor, and power. This interest is influenced by seeing my mothers use their gender and the erotic as a source of power but also considering how that weighs against a patriarchal, racially discriminant, and capitalistic system. This experience informs how I process these forces in my life today.

Ji Zou decided to become an artist after having completed a Bachelor of Science degree at the University of Michigan in 2016. As, once again, told to Rubén Palma:

 I decided to be an artist in 2016 after undergrad but I was distracted by trying to make enough money to support myself and stay sane in New York City. The pandemic in 2020 gave me a lot of space and time to immerse myself in my personal work without external influence and distraction. I took almost a 2 year break from social media and all I did was draw, read, write, cook, and work out. It was an extremely disciplined and structured time which was very generative for my art. I believe this was when I started taking my practice as seriously as I do now.

On the topic of Ji Zou’s artistic practice, they usually start by sketching from whatever visual archive they have been building recently—sometimes from dreams, books, the internet, or films. The image changes as they sketch, and a bit of whatever they’re going through is imbued in the sketch. When they like something they’ve made, they transfer that to their iPad and apply colours through Procreate. Sometimes they also collage photographs and other references. They take the digital reference, and they apply the image to the physical canvas/frame they’ve made. The piece changes even more when they start to apply different materials like mica, organza, holographic paint, etc. According to Ji Zou themselves, ’I usually work until I don’t know what else I can do.’

This practice produces dreamlike and surreal scenes that captivate the viewer and are powerful enough to convey all sorts of emotions. According to Ji Zou, finally:

Each painting is a bit different but generally, my work draws from recent experiences and how I can represent how those experiences feel in a visual sense rather than how they actually look. I tune into the subconscious manifestations of those experiences so often there’s clear emotion and symbols present but the space is undefined since perception and consciousness cannot be located. I always want my work to help to bridge my subjective experience with the experiences of others. 

Provenance

CFHILL, Stockholm, Gazing Bodies, 6 September - 4 October 2024.

Firestorm Foundation (acquired from the above).

Copyright Firestorm Foundation