“Starry Hen 7.” All pictures © Changyu Zou, shared with permission
Tinged with magic and metaphor, the energetic illustrations by Savannah-based Chinese language artist Changyu Zou are emotionally candid and replicate her reactions to verse. “I believe poetry makes use of essentially the most stunning phrases to specific what’s most actual within the poet’s coronary heart. Though these phrases generally are very summary and never straightforward to know, they can provide me limitless creativeness,” she says, sharing that she tends to drag just a few phrases or phrases from a poem after which use these as the premise for her drawings.
Zou strives for an interaction between the unique textual content and her visible language, which frequently depends on a feverish mishmash of figures and symbols. The mixed-media illustrations—she works with each digital and analog supplies, together with gouache, acrylics, crayons, coloured pencils, and generally collaged particulars—draw immediately from the Misty Poets, a practice that emerged in defiance of the restrictive Cultural Revolution of Twentieth-century China and is characterised by its obscure haziness. This mysterious and indeterminate high quality arises in Zou’s works as birds, human fingers, automobiles, homes, and different objects seem to whirl in chaotic movement.
Along with the Misty Poets, the illustrator mentions Kahlil Gibran, Haizi, and Rabindranath Tagore as influences. One line of Tagore’s “Starry Hen” reads “gentle in my coronary heart the night star of relaxation after which let the night time whisper to me of affection” and impressed Zou’s sequence by the identical identify. ” As a result of Tagore’s poetry expresses the concord of life and nature, I selected components for these to symbolize people, equivalent to automobiles and homes, and in addition components that symbolize nature, equivalent to birds,” she shares. “They’re collectively on a planetary ring, expressing a state of concord and love.”
Zou is making ready for a solo exhibition this fall, so keep watch over her Instagram for information about that present and different tasks. (by way of Inventive Growth)
“Starry Hen 1”
“Plan Adviser 1”
“The World Remade”
“Starry Hen 6”
“Starry Hen 4”
“Plan Adviser 2”
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