Please welcome back the last of Synkroniciti’s Featured Artists for “Wild,” visual artist Aleza Zheng. We had a spotlight article on Aleza in “Intersections” and couldn’t resist featuring “Nest,” a wonderfully detailed and transfixing drawing in pen, ink and gouache, in “Wild.” We often think of nests as safe places but, in the wild, they are anything but safe. Predators are drawn to nests for easy food and many eggs are lost before they ever hatch. Aleza gives us a richly textured nest complete with a viper and a wasp. Our first reaction is to lean in to examine the structure with lichens, rotting leaves and plant matter. Our second reaction is to recoil at the potential for bites and stings. Aleza meticulously blends light and shadow, black and white, to create the illusion of realism.
Order your copy of “Wild” to view Aleza’s spellbinding artwork: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Aleza Zheng (b. 1999, China) investigates the relationship between human, object, and image-making. Palimpsests of domestic living spaces, her paintings are a composition of fixtures, openings, and artifacts from foreign spaces transported to an imagined reality. Chairs, lamps, and objects stand in the set as dumb protagonists, quiet observers of a phantom subject. Attuned to painting’s significance as a means of archiving, the artist organizes pieces of the world into realities held together on a canvas. This creates a manufactured world of objects brought into being by artificial chiaroscuro. She uses photo transfers and film emulsion lifts to superimpose media images onto her painted interiors, drawing attention to the multitude of spaces where images reside and what they signify to the environment they are in. Aleza Zheng’s work is informed by sources such as politics, literature, and social behavior. Her work contains historical references and the phenomenology of the everyday. Her practice in painting, drawing, and printmaking expresses the contemporary condition of the individual living in an increasingly urbanized environment.