Meet the Artist: Zipiao Zhang Makes a Bold Paris Debut Reimagining Floral Still Life

At 13 rue de Turbigo in Paris, an encounter unfolds between East and West, instinct and control, vitality and decay. Presented by Derouillon x Salon 94, “Blooming II” marks Chinese artist Zipiao Zhang’s first solo exhibition in Europe, a striking showcase of new paintings that challenge the still life genre with unsettling urgency and bodily seduction. Born in Beijing in 1993, Zhang has long explored the politics of the body. Her practice focuses on what she describes as “gender imagery,” confronting traditional social and ethical frameworks with canvases that pulse with life, vulnerability, and unapologetic physicality. In Blooming II, the body is present in every bloom, each petal a muscle, each stem a tendon, each floral organ a visceral metaphor. These are not gentle bouquets, but living anatomies rendered in oil, intuitive gestures that evoke both the grotesque and the divine.

Zhang’s Signature Motifs and Intuitive Approach

The works in “Blooming” II build on Zhang’s signature motifs: cut fruits, mollusks, spiders…subjects she previously painted as metaphors for inner states and carnal truths. Here, she turns her attention to flowers, long associated with beauty, femininity, and impermanence. Yet in Zhang’s hands, peonies, roses, and orchids are anything but ornamental. In Bouquet 03 (2024), for example, a large-scale composition vibrates with dissonant hues, blood red, flesh pink, acid green rendering the roses almost monstrous in their sensuality. Orchid 2401 and Orchid 2402 are studies in metaphysical ambiguity, their curling, carnivorous forms oscillating between ecstasy and agony, between soft seduction and looming threat.

“I associate their textures and colors with flesh and meat,” Zhang explains of her flowers. “From reds and pinks to the slightly milky beige that sometimes appears in fat… When I paint flowers, nothing is fixed in advance; they appear to me in the emotion of the moment. I like to give free rein to my imagination.”

“I like to give free rein to my imagination,”

Zipiao Zhang

This intuitive, almost improvisational approach is central to her practice. There are no preparatory sketches, no rehearsed compositions. Her brushwork is bold and urgent, at times carving deep grooves of pigment, at others laying down translucent veils of color that evoke skin, fat, and fluid. Her flowers unfold like bodies in flux, split open, blooming, decaying.

Personal Experience Leads to a Unique Visual Language

Zhang’s fascination with the body stems from personal and familial experiences. Her father, a professor of animation at Tsinghua University, nurtured her love of drawing. Her mother, a doctor, unwittingly contributed imagery to her daughter’s imagination through late-night glimpses of medical scans and surgical images. This early exposure to the inside of the body, its rawness, left a permanent mark on Zhang, later deepened by her encounter with Western painting. While studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she repeatedly visited Francis Bacon’s Figure with Meat (1954) and became intrigued by its lineage back to Chaïm Soutine’s Carcass of Beef. Those works, in all their brutality, offered Zhang a visual language for her own metaphysical inquiries. Where beauty and violence coexisted.

Blooming II furthers this investigation with remarkable coherence. The four monumental Rose paintings, Rose 2401 through Rose 2404, offer a symphonic treatment of color and sensation. Their brushstrokes suggest motion, scent, even sound. In Orchid 2402, a haunting duel of black and flesh-pink unfurls against a misty green background, evoking absence and melancholy as much as pleasure. These are not decorative gestures, but emotionally charged performances of painting.

A Disciplined Studio Practice Echoing Historical Female Artists

Indeed, Zhang treats painting as an amplifier of emotion. Her studio practice is disciplined and solitary: long hours of focused silence, followed by running sessions to exhaust the body and sharpen intuition. “Intuitions are as dangerous as sparks from a flame,” she says. “If you let them run wild, you risk losing everything… I control and transform this flow of intuitions, this inspiration so rare that it must be captured.”

“I control and transform this flow of intuitions, this inspiration so rare that it must be captured,”

Zipiao Zhang

In this way, Zhang’s method echoes that of historical women artists whose work embodied both control and transcendence. The comparison to Georgia O’Keeffe is natural not just for the floral subject matter, but for the ability to conjure mysticism and sexuality through abstraction. Zhang encountered O’Keeffe’s work in Chicago and resonated with her assertion that “there is something unexplored about women that only a woman can explore.” The parallels extend to Hilma af Klint, too, whose spiritually charged biomorphic paintings were executed without preparatory drawings. Like them, Zhang channels internal visions that push beyond the limits of realism, embracing imperfection and imbalance.

A Visceral Experience for the Audience

Her paintings are not only visual experiences but somatic ones. They ask to be felt as much as seen. Susan Sontag once wrote of Antonin Artaud that “the space in which art is consumed is also the mind viewed as the organic totality of feeling, physical sensation, and the ability to attribute meaning.” This description could just as well apply to “Blooming II,” where each canvas becomes a stage for transformation, catharsis, and desire.

At thirty-two, Zhang is part of a generation of Chinese artists reshaping contemporary painting from within. While her rise has been swift, named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30 Asia” list in 2019, with major shows at the Long Museum, X Museum, and Salon 94, she remains an enigmatic figure. Her work resists easy interpretation, preferring to leave viewers suspended in that fragile space between the known and the felt.

With “Blooming II,” Salon 94 and Galerie Derouillon introduce Europe to an artist who refuses to flinch before the rawness of life. Her flowers bloom not just with color, but with muscle, memory, and sensation. They are a reminder that beauty is not always soft. Sometimes it bleeds.