One of the most vital things that we ask of artists is that their work reflect something essential about the place where they live and and the historical moment that they are witnessing. For most artists, this can be a fairly simple matter of transforming identifiable parts of their surrounding environment into a functioning visual metaphor for their circumstances — a metaphor that can be easily ‘read’ by any astute viewer. For the young Chinese painter Chunhua Zhang, currently in New York as a resident artist at the International Studio and Curatorial Program,, the challenge of engaging the viewer in a shared body of sensory information is somewhat more challenging. Sometimes the choice to operate within a visual code requires that certain references appear, simultaneously, both as what they clearly are, and as open-ended propositions that can be plausibly denied. An example of this balancing act is the tall vertical painting a statue of Mao standing on a plinth, seen from behind through openings in a chain link fence. A single word,, in which the father of Chinese Communism, his right arm upraised as he states his case, faces away from us. The printed word STILL, which floats in pink at the top of the picture, suggests two closely related meanings: a form of stasis in which nothing changes, and a sense of quiet lingering over the evidently nocturnal scene. Although it would be an error to bring an overly literal interpretation to the painting, what’s unmistakeable is a sense of waiting and anticipation generated by the contrasting references, as if to acknowledge that the historical past is no longer directly accessible to us, but must be understood as moving away from the present moment, in a completely different direction. The implicit paradox of contemporary society looking to its past for guidance and consensus, while confronted by the reality that this history has become remote and inscrutable, is not difficult to interpret, but it remains just ambiguous enough that it could also be explained by a differently shaded, less critical, interpretation. With his largest recent painting, Zhang details the surfaces and objects currently found in his current Brooklyn apartment, including an open closet, a plastic trash bag, a mirror, an umbrella and a panting on the wall. The address of the apartment, which appears carved or inscribed onto the glowing gold-hued surface, occupies the entire left quarter of the picture, as if in acknowledgement of its tentative position within a long historical continuum of painters sharing with us a composite image of the place where the painting was made. It is firstly a depiction of a casual arrangement of inanimate things, but behind that surface we sense an urge to unlock an intense connection with the viewer through the medium of ordinary objects that possess no allegorical weight of their own. Hovering between these two contrasting points of reference are a series of small paintings on paper that bring us closer to the paradox involved in creative expression occurring within a context of limited artistic license. Each modest scene shows a seemingly ordinary moment and place — a globe resting the edge of a side table, thin curtains dangling outside an open window, a piano with a broken leg — that is also a fragmentary view of a world in which the apparently placid surface only partly conceals a subtle yet constant warning of a potentially destabilized future.

 Dan Cameron December 2019