The Breathing Surface of New Life
Yi Zhu’s visual vocabulary continues to evolve in directions both deeply speculative and uncompromisingly visceral. In this second examination of his work—following his earlier AATONAU feature—we return not to retrace steps but to explore new creative terrain. Where his past paintings offered a deconstruction of historical memory and personal trauma, his recent pieces push further into ontological speculation and post-human transformation. Winner of three Gold Awards from international art institutions including the WODACC and FADA UK, Yi Zhu has moved beyond the boundaries of artistic genre and into a territory of conceptual vitality.
His award-winning piece Hello, It’s Me serves as a conceptual anchor. This surreal composition introduces a self-aware, cross-species entity that emerges into being through the artist’s hand. Painted with acid tones and fluid anatomical distortion, the figure refuses traditional identification—it is neither human nor animal, but something that breathes beyond the limits of biological category. In Yi Zhu’s words, this being declares: “I am a new species; I have never existed in this world before.” The piece embodies a shift from passive representation to speculative generation, drawing upon Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome as a metaphor for non-linear, decentralized connection.
This non-hierarchical visual logic recurs throughout his current body of work. In Hello, It’s Me No.03 and Growth and Companion, the distinction between organism and environment, figure and background, begins to collapse. Each fragment—eye, limb, or leaf—can emerge as a conceptual node. This openness does not create chaos, but rather a visual field in constant becoming. By rejecting the “tree-like” structure of visual hierarchy, Yi Zhu allows each part of the painting to vibrate with equal potential, insisting that life—true life—is generated through interrelation, not dominance.
Yi Zhu: Painting Without a Center
Yi Zhu’s newer works articulate a powerful critique of categorical identity through radical anatomical reconstruction. In Desire: Torn and Struggling No.01, a painting populated by intertwined limbs, the body is presented not as a vessel but as a volatile interface—one that resists stability, coherence, and narrative finality. Hands grasp and collapse into fluid shapes, echoing veins, seeds, or embryonic structures. In place of a fixed self, there is a process of becoming: life formed through repetition, struggle, and regeneration.
The painting From Chaos to Order introduces sharp spatial interventions—floating geometric forms descend toward a lone figure that fuses feline and human traits. This mythic hybrid stands upon rippling blue water beneath an architectural sky, challenging the viewer’s sense of gravity and containment. Here, space is not a background but a philosophical proposition: a layered construction that mirrors inner psychological states. The figure’s ambiguous posture and symbolic adornments suggest themes of surveillance, resistance, and the search for rootedness amid collapse.
Further exploring the body as a mutable system, Industrial drive fuels desire offers a mechanized fusion of the organic and the industrial. Metallic tubing coils through flesh-toned forms, gears grind against botanical elements, and eyes surface as if remembering. The title alone implies a confrontation between rigidity and fluidity, environment and embodiment. It captures a world where desire has been systematized and mechanized, yet remains irrepressibly alive. Yi Zhu does not offer salvation or synthesis—he paints the tension itself, in full visual volume.
Visions Composed in Tension
Yi Zhu’s approach to composition reveals a deliberate embrace of contradiction. Across his recent works, one witnesses a consistent oscillation between seduction and discomfort, clarity and distortion. His color choices have grown more assertive, often employing jarring neon hues—pinks, cyans, acid yellows—that command attention but never settle into harmony. This can be seen vividly in Blue Lotus 01, where undulating forms blend human legs with petal-like structures, and the background pulses with spiraling florals. The visual field buzzes with motion, suggesting that nothing remains still—not even identity.
In My World and This World No.02, a previously discussed piece that continues to resonate with new relevance, Yi Zhu presents dismembered limbs suspended in a dual-toned field. The pink represents subjective emotion, while the blue denotes external observation, but neither maintains dominance. Detached eyes stare in all directions, evoking both surveillance and introspection. This is not a binary but a spectrum; Yi Zhu situates the psyche as a fragmented zone in continuous negotiation. The viewer is prompted to recognize their own multiplicity and the emotional volatility of existing across inner and outer spheres.
Repulsion, Alignment, Attraction – Generating an Existence, perhaps Yi Zhu’s most explicitly structured conceptual work, introduces a narrative arc within a singular painting. Here, visual cues suggest an unfolding ecology of tension: mechanical forms entangle with muscular flesh, implying a clash between the synthetic and the organic. However, through that friction, new modes of being arise. What begins in repulsion gradually shifts toward co-adaptation and, finally, attraction—not as romance, but as mutual recognition. Rather than a utopian vision, Yi Zhu paints a possible future conditioned by difference, complexity, and survival through interdependence.
Yi Zhu: Art as Cognitive Liberation
At the core of Yi Zhu’s evolving visual language lies a consistent philosophical pursuit: to liberate perception from the confines of conventional cognition. His artworks are not windows into a world; they are cognitive tools that reshape the act of seeing itself. With each painting, Yi Zhu extends an invitation to perceive beyond the binary, to engage with anatomy, ecology, and identity not as closed categories but as open sites of possibility. The repeated appearance of disembodied eyes, metamorphic limbs, and layered spatial geometries echoes this commitment to perceptual expansion.
In Desire: Torn and Struggling No.01, Blue Lotus 01, and From Chaos to Order, Yi Zhu’s use of gesture and form invokes a muscular kind of intuition. The paintings seem to breathe—contracting and expanding—not as illusions, but as existential assertions. Here, cognition is tied to embodiment; thought is felt. The recurring motif of hands and feet, often exaggerated or abstracted, grounds the work in tactility and motion, anchoring abstract ideas in the sensory experience of flesh.
The artist’s underlying structure is the rhizome: not a metaphor, but a methodology. Rather than presenting themes through linear development, he allows multiple centers of meaning to emerge across the surface of each canvas. Every brushstroke functions like a neural synapse—autonomous yet connected, capable of both memory and invention. In Hello, It’s Me, this principle becomes literal as a fictional species addresses the viewer directly. But even in less narrative works, such as Cement Space No.03, the decentralized logic holds. There is no focal point because everything pulses with potential; the painting becomes a thinking organism.
Yi Zhu’s recent accolades—the Global Best Creative Award, the FADA UK Gold Prize, and the World Green Sustainable Design Award—affirm his position not only as a painter of skill but as a thinker of form. His practice resists aesthetic containment, urging viewers to move from looking to becoming. In this process, he creates not just art, but possibility.
