Suxing Zhang is a Sydney-based visual artist whose work investigates duration and relation as a condition of coexistence. Through composite figurative environments, he explores how disparate histories, images, and temporalities encounter one another without being reduced to a unified whole. Informed by Édouard Glissant’s philosophy of relation and opacity, his paintings construct open pictorial spaces in which meaning remains provisional, layered, and continually reconfigured. Zhang has exhibited throughout Australia and internationally, and has been a finalist in the National Emerging Art Prize, Hornsby Art Prize, Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, and the International ARC Salon.

Can you tell us about your background and how you started your artistic journey?

I didn’t come through the traditional art school route. Outside of my work as an artist, my background is actually in mathematics. Art has been something I explored and learned largely on my own. 

I had always drawn and painted, but my artistic journey really began with photography. I worked with photography for about five years and received several international awards. But over time, I began to feel that photography couldn’t quite express what I wanted to express. I was looking for a medium that could move further away from reality – something that allowed more uncertainty and more room for imagination. Then the pandemic happened, and during lockdown it became very difficult to continue making photographs in the way I had been. That was when I began painting more seriously. What started partly because of circumstance gradually became the medium through which I felt I could explore my ideas much more freely.

What are the main themes or concepts you explore in your work?

The main ideas I explore are relation, opacity, and duration, particularly how different relationships accumulate, change, and continue to affect one another over time.

We live in a world where we are constantly connected and have access to an enormous amount of information. I think this can sometimes create a kind of arrogance: we expect that if we analyse something closely enough, we can fully understand it and make it transparent. But our understanding is never neutral. It is always shaped by our own time, culture, geography, and personal experience. So I’m interested in the opposite possibility: what if we accept that people, histories, and cultures can remain partly opaque to one another, and still coexist and influence each other?

In my paintings, I explore this through what I call misalignment. The most visible example is the physical structure of some of my paintings, where separate panels are deliberately shifted rather than perfectly aligned. But misalignment also happens inside the image. I bring together figures, objects, architecture, and fragments of images that come from different periods, places, cultures, and my own personal archive. They share the same space, but they don’t completely belong together. Some things connect, while others remain slightly displaced or unresolved. For me, that becomes a way of thinking about relation itself – not as complete understanding, but as something that can remain partial and still continue over time.

At the same time, I’m not using an experimental or avant-garde visual language to explore these ideas. I’m interested in doing almost the opposite – returning to something very traditional – figurative painting. The figures in my work are not necessarily characters performing a particular story. I think of them more as presences within these accumulated spaces, affected by their surroundings just as the surroundings are affected by them. Ultimately, I don’t want the painting to explain these ideas to the viewer. I want to turn something that begins as a way of thinking into something that can be felt.

How has your artistic style evolved over time?

Every year, I come back to two questions: What is my characteristic visual language and technique? And how do they reflect the ideas I’m trying to explore? Those two questions are really the foundation of how my style develops. The answers keep changing, so naturally the work keeps changing as well.

In my earlier paintings, I relied much more on narrative. I would create a scene or a certain atmosphere as a way of expressing an idea. Gradually, I started removing that narrative structure. The images became more fragmented, and I began bringing together elements from increasingly different times, places, and cultural contexts. As that happened, misalignment naturally became much more important in my work.

This year, I’ve started pushing that idea beyond the image itself. I’m painting on linoleum and collaging other materials onto the surface, so misalignment now also happens at the level of material. Different surfaces meet, overlap, interrupt one another, or almost seem to fit together without ever completely doing so.

I think that sense of almost connecting, but never fully connecting, has gradually become central to my visual language. It exists in the imagery, in the composition, and now in the physical construction of the painting itself. So for me, the evolution of my style has really been a process of finding ways for the form and material of the painting to embody the ideas I’m exploring.

How do you approach exhibiting your work? What are your goals when showing your art in public spaces?

I usually work in series, so when I think about an exhibition, I don’t really think of it as simply putting a group of individual paintings on the wall. The ideas I’m working with need time and space to unfold across a number of works, and because of that, the exhibition space itself has become increasingly important to me. For example, for my solo exhibition in Sydney this year, the exhibition team and I transformed the gallery into something between my study and my studio. We filled the space with books from my own shelves, so the environment carried something of the place where the work had been developed. At the same time that I was making the paintings, I was also writing poetry, so fragments of those poems appeared throughout the exhibition, placed between the paintings. There was also a desk covered with loose pieces of paper and fragments of writing.

I like working this way because it allows the exhibition to become an extension of the paintings rather than simply a space where they are displayed. The paintings, texts, objects, and the space itself can all contribute to the experience of the work.

When I show my work publicly, what I’m most interested in is creating a certain kind of encounter with the viewer. I don’t particularly want someone to stand in front of a painting and try to decode what everything means. I also don’t expect the viewer to arrive at the same understanding that I do. I would rather they allow the relationships within the work to remain partly unresolved. What matters to me is that they spend enough time with the work for their own relationship with it to begin to form. I want there to be a different sense of time in the exhibition – a feeling that time has slowed down or stretched out. 

What advice would you give to emerging artists trying to establish themselves?

I’m actually not sure I would describe myself as established yet. I’m still constantly exploring and trying to find the forms that feel right for what I want to express. And because of that, one thing I try not to do is define myself too early or put myself into a particular category.

I also think every artist finds their own path, so rather than giving advice, I can share something that has been useful for me. I usually find a direction that genuinely interests me and make a body of work around it. I think simply making enough work is very important. I need that accumulation before I can really see what is mine. Then I look back at the work and ask myself what I’m drawn to, what I’m not, and what feels like it has more potential. I take those things into the next body of work and keep going. After repeating that process several times, I gradually began to recognise my own visual language that felt natural and specific to me.

What projects are you currently working on, and what can we expect from you in the future? 

I’m working on a new project which grew out of my most recent solo exhibition. During the exhibition, I collected pieces of writing from visitors. Some were fragments of stories, some were vague or incomplete memories, and others were personal observations about the world. These texts work as a new kind of archival material. What interests me is what happens when a piece of writing is removed from the context in which it was originally written. I might misunderstand it, take only a fragment of it, or interpret it through my own experience. Then, when I translate that fragment into an image, it changes again. By the time it becomes part of a painting, its original meaning may have been almost completely transformed. I’m interested in that chain of transformation, through which meaning is never transferred perfectly. Something is lost, changed, or added along the way. This new series takes that process and brings it into the way I already work with found images, historical references, and personal archives.

As for what’s next, I have another exhibition in Melbourne, Australia towards the end of this year. After that, I want to focus fully on developing this new body of work. I don’t know exactly where it will lead yet, and I think that uncertainty is important to my process. I want to push the relationship between text, image, material, and misalignment further, and hopefully discover something in the process. I’d like this project to develop into another solo exhibition.

Text and photo courtesy of Suxing Zhang

Website: https://www.suxingzhang.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/suxing_zhang