Triumph Gallery is pleased to announce the debut solo exhibition of the artist Zhu Ziwei, “The Hidden, The Confessional”, opening at the gallery on June 14, 2025. This exhibition presents over twenty paintings by Zhu Ziwei between 2023 and 2025. Through these works, we shall witness how the artist draws nourishment from literature, and—guided by her keen sensitivity and the intuitive brushwork honed through years of practice—refined into a distinctive personal style. We also glimpse of the future potential harbored within these brushstrokes, ranging from somber restraint to unbridled expressiveness. Curated by kikizhu, the exhibition will run until July 27th.
As a painter who has demonstrated remarkable promise from the outset of her professional career, Zhu Ziwei has demonstrated remarkable promise, emerging as a paragon. Her work possesses a presence that is not overtly assertive yet conveys a profound sense of conviction. Zhu Ziwei seldom depicts ready-made imagery. Instead, her canvases are inhabited by the layered landscapes of memory, association, literary afterimages, and fragmented, symbolic traces of reality. Their sense of volume is diminished, allowing them to float weightlessly across the canvas, generating new meanings in suspension, while that which is obscured continues its discourse in silence. Though often symbolic, these pictorial elements remain rooted in reality; concealed faces and scraped traces imply trauma and discipline. They are candidly reflect on the female predicament and point to universal human conditions. The contours of recurring objects and temporal motifs, reminiscent of refrains, remind us of the sharpness and absurdity of existence that perpetually lurk within everyday details.
The strong textual quality of Zhu Ziwei's work is also evident in the scribbled lines traversing her canvases. These legible words and illegible markings preserve narrative traces while simultaneously suggesting the boundaries of meaning and interpretation. Furthermore, this "writing," as the trace of bodily movement—whether urgent or wandering—is a gesture of expression. Similarly, the recurring motif of halved fruit in Zhu's work can be seen as a form of self-exposure, reflecting both the artist's vulnerability and her longstanding interest in flattening pictorial forms.
These works defy simplistic categorization, just as they deliberately avoid straightforward, focal-point compositions. They suggest to the viewer that the essential act is to step onto the winding path—to engage in the process of discovering meaning within the layered imagery.
