Born in Hanzhong in 2002, Xi Zhu is currently pursuing a master’s degree in the Multi-dimensional Studio of the Oil Painting Department at the China Academy of Art, and lives in Hangzhou.

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The course of art history has always been gently nudged along by new media. Just as photography’s shutter cut through classical painting’s myth of “representation,” in the digital age Zhu takes up the paintbrush as a different kind of blade. She does not believe painting should curl up in the folds of its time. Instead, she insists on pushing this ancient craft forward. In her work, smooth gradients tangle with the texture of oil paint, and screen light and shadow seep into traditional pictorial schemas. The old orders torn apart by digital technology are being stitched back together through painting.

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What matters more to Zhu is: when the lighting logic of cinema, the grammar of classical imagery, and the emotional resonance of popular visual culture all pour onto the canvas, can painting stop being a “recorder” and become a “conversant”? Just as oil once replaced tempera and perspective overturned the flat picture plane, Zhu is writing a new answer for the digital age with her brush. That answer isn’t found in the highlights of technology. It lives in the collision of pigment and canvas, in the vivid tremor of this moment that bursts out from it.