CULT Aimee Friberg is pleased to announce Alien Life—an exhibition of oil paintings by Bay Area based artist Ruxue Zhang, on view from May 1 through July 13 at 1401 16th Street, San Francisco. This is the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery.
Ruxue Zhang’s work serves to question our perception of the world(s) we inhabit. She is interested in the space that exists between the viewer and what is perceived. Her paintings explore the philosophical and the metaphysical, her subject matter could be defined as an observation on the act of looking. Zhang works in unique multiples, employing repetition and variance, and evoking memory through highly rendered paintings that approach photo-realism, and portray similar events from slightly different angles, or moments in time.
Growing up outside of Beijing, China, Zhang was fascinated by stories of aliens and UFOs from the US. She imagined one day coming to the US to look for aliens. When she moved to San Francisco in 2016 to attend grad school she comprehended another significance of that term—and felt herself to be an alien living in a strange land. Says Zhang on recognizing that it wasn’t the relocation to a different continent that made her feel alien-like, but rather, “I am the alien no matter where I go. It’s not something that I can run away from. In fact, my alien perspective provides me with a unique way of seeing the world, just like the first photo of the earth from the moon. One day I took a trip to Angel Island and came upon the shuttered immigration station there. It had been a detention facility for those seeking a new life, but especially for Chinese immigrants. Some were detained for months, others years. I found Chinese poems carved into the hard wooden walls, poems about sorrow, anger, and hope. For the first time I felt a connection with my home country since I moved to the US. I realized no matter how alienated I feel, I am still looking for the earthling in me.”
From this earthling vantage point in Alien Life, Zhang seeks to capture the insurmountable on the canvas: the difficulty of comprehending words between two people; the frustration of not being understood, and the potential of finding joy in ordinary moments. Zhang works from photos she has captured of relatable moments from everyday life, juxtaposed with astronomy images and photographs from outer space. Zhang meticulously renders moments over and again, referencing previous paintings through a mediated layer of time and space. Using humor and nostalgia, Zhang’s paintings float between the familiar and the bizarre. She’s interested in the collision of how we imagine the outer realms of our physical world, and the collective envisioning of the heavenly cosmos, and everything in between. Zhang is interested in how technology gives us a way to see beyond the immediate and consider the significance we give to the quotidian and the extraordinary. Zhang’s says her goal is to destroy the illusion of linear time, and to gain a more expansive view of the universe and our place in it.
Ruxue Zhang was born in 1992 in Wenzhou, China. She received her BFA from Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 2015, and her MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2018. Her work has been exhibited at CULT Aimee Friberg, Root Division, Saint Joseph’s Art Society, Embark Gallery, and Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco, San Jose Mineta International Airport, Pacific Art League in Palo Alto, Cal State University in Los Angeles, Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing and CAFA Museum in Beijing. Zhang has multiple works in the collection of Fidelity Investments in US, CAFA Museum in Beijing, and the Ministry of Education in China. She lives and works in between San Francisco, and San Jose, CA.
