Zhou Li is a key example of a contemporary artist whose work exists between the historical differences and commonalities of East and West. Her father and brothers were traditional Chinese artists, which was formative to her practice. Her first experience with abstract painting came when she went to live and study in France, from 1995 to 2003, which provided her with a rich understanding of the vast changes that had taken place in Western art history.¹ The visual abundance we sense when we encounter her paintings bears connections with the dense historical strata of Eastern and Western painting and reinterpretations of their formal vocabulary. The poetic sentiments that her canvases reveal stem both from her expressive approach and from ideas residing within the artist: a fecund ‘spiritual freedom’ and a philosophy of the self contained within nature. Zhou has described her creative process through the metaphor of ‘standing in the window’, by which she means, ‘in the middle of relationships such as those between ego and soul, human being and nature, self and others, lightness and weight, and emptiness and fullness.’ Through standing at a window which connects her to the rest of the world, her paintings are able to capture single moments that collapse both the vast cosmos visible outside, to the minute instants that only she can detect. This narrative relates the fundaments of nature with transcendent time, cutting across the histories and imageries that have preoccupied both the East and the West.

As Zhou has said, ‘Nature is the self… in that substance is unconstrained by form, unbounded, and infinitely open’.² Her profound embrace of, and trust in, nature is what shapes the colours, brush lines, changes, and correspondences – the energy that she commands. A sense of hope emerges in her paintings as the light of nature and the light of the self are brought together, through her own reflections on the relationship between the self and the wider world. To her, hope is light; it exists in the moments of life as can be experienced through everyday nature. In this exhibition, Zhou projects that light of hope onto a single flower.

Zhou presents work from her series ‘The world in a flower’ (2025); flowers blossom richly only to plaintively fade away, behaving as ‘mirrors that reflect the universe.’³ In this cycle of emergence and extinction, flowers summon interactions with other life; they sway in the wind and harbour sensuality within their buds. Their pink petals flourish in the sun and emanate fresh aromas that ripple through the air. New leaves and fruits appear where the flowers once bloomed and, as the seasons change, everything breathlessly awaits the next efflorescence. The cycles of the flowers – which offer a blessing for the order of the universe and the earth’s ecosystem – present in Zhou’s paintings as the rhythm and blossoming of brushstrokes. The aesthetics and sublimity of natural presences that propel endless change are rendered as a vibrant metamorphosis on the canvas.

The world in a flower: A flower lying low (2024–25) is a work that charts the changes that Zhou witnesses in flowers. Upon a sizeable canvas, Zhou’s layers of primal red paint condense the changes of nature into comprehensive moments. Budding rhythms of colour move in ways that welcome the bright light of pink hues, which for the artist possess a ‘gentle strength… also filled with feminine power – it may be the soft colour of the early morning sky or the intensity of a flame, the colour of a blooming flower or the colour of galaxies in distant space.’ Her definition of pink is most fully explored in the series ‘The world in a flower: Metamorphosis’ (2025); from the intense, variegated colours of the petal to the tenacious vitality of a slender stamen, the flower is conveyed through translucent, dynamically intersecting strokes of pink.

Zhou’s unique palette, which has been chosen for its ability to suggest light and hope, emerges out of the artist’s analyses of the hues used in the cave paintings of Dunhuang and the frescoes of Pompeii. According to the artist, they are ‘designed to simulate the effects of pigments on different substrate layers and when mixed with various binding media… I borrowed the technique of various frescoes and used mineral pigments in layers, as if depositing time on the canvas.’ It is through these experiments with colour that the material and aesthetic resonances of early Eastern and Western wall art are transplanted into her paintings. ‘Murals’ (2023–ongoing), a series using a pentagonal-shaped canvas, represents Zhou’s attempt to evoke a transcendence that can be found through an unchanging centre. Here, the artist parallels the subject of religious transcendence commonly found in ancient murals and the almost-immortal robustness of mineral pigments, with the finite existence of flowers and the logic of nature’s endless cycling. In so doing, the work deals with what Gaston Bachelard described in the introduction to Water and Dreams (1942), as the inner imagination and poetics which can be found dormant within organic materials.

With points and lines that drift freely over the canvas, the works also call to the viewer’s mind the spiritual qualities of Eastern calligraphy. The materials of paper, brush, and ink that are used in East Asian calligraphy are the same tools employed in traditional Chinese ink painting, such that the act of painting also conjures mental images associated with pictographic Chinese characters. The curator Lu Mingjun has observed how Zhou has practiced calligraphy for years as a form of self-cultivation, with brushstrokes that bear similar gestures to her lines on the canvas. The ideas originating in calligraphy can also be said to drive modernist painting in its more intuitive and radical directions; with the expressionist tendencies of calligraphy bearing close connection to the development of abstract painting in the West.

‘Mandala’ (2024–ongoing), another series presented at this exhibition, concerns itself with the notion that the entire universe can be reflected in a flower. The concept of the mandala in Tibetan Buddhism refers to both ‘encircling a centre’ and ‘essence’, and is an expression of the perfect connection that extends from the universe to the self. In a text entitled ‘Zhou Li: Four Seasons’, Sheng Liyu offers a detailed description of the artist’s stay in Lhasa, Tibet, in 2023. There, Zhou not only saw the high-altitude flowers and landscapes of the Tibetan city of Nyingchi (Linzhi), but also experienced a new spiritual beginning through the ‘dialectical’ perspective she gained on the self: an exploration of ‘me and us; the self and all objects; and oneness and all things.’⁴ It is these Buddhist reflections that have made it possible for her to access the realm of ‘spiritual freedom’ described above – the state of openness where ‘nature is the self’.

For Zhou, time is only a matter of eternity manifesting in a moment, and all of space can be located within a petal. Her approach is rooted in metaphysical questions about the essence of being. Hers is a place where the boundary between the self and the universe disappears. Perhaps we too belong to the ‘world in a flower’: we sustain our body and spirit through the original materials of the universe, and resonate with nature, embedded as we are in the rhythms of the cosmos. When Zhou describes the flower as a ‘reflection of the universe’,⁵ she is referring to the way in which all things are mirrored and exist in each other as the inherent logic and principle of nature, from creation to destruction, to change.

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Nayeon Gu (b. 1976) is an art critic based in Seoul, South Korea. She studied art theory at the Korea National University of Arts and Hongik University. Since 2008, she has been writing about contemporary East Asian art and conducting research on postwar Japanese art. She teaches at Kookmin University’s College of Design.

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¹ Pui Yin Tong, ‘A gaze from the world in the window’, Zhou Li, White Cube, 2019, pp.5-11.
² Zhou Li, ‘Water and Dreams’, Zhou Li, Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2024, pp. 247-249.
³ From Zhou Li’s unpublished reflections, ‘One Flower, One World’, 10 March 2025.
⁴ Zhou, ‘One Flower, One World’, 2025.
⁵ Zhou, ‘One Flower, One World’, 2025.