Dan Zhu: Night into Nights

Dan Zhu is an artist based between The Hague and Shenyang and winner of the C.o.C.A Award 2020. In this exhibition, she presents several large-scale works, smaller drawings and murals. The most recent among these were developed during Zhu’s return visit to China this year. Zhu is fascinated by fiction and the subconscious in their intermingling with reality. Figured together with her paintings are a combination of familiar objects and phenomena drawn from everyday life, as well as ideas and feelings that she derives from her own daydreams.

In her earlier practice, Zhu commenced from a curiosity in invisible universal forces. More recently, her point of arrival lies with pigment itself. Tracing the origins of pigments to a variety of plant and earth matter drawn from a particular mountain, Zhu seeks to pivot towards imaginations of prior- and post- formations of the so-called ‘human’ body and spirit. She unravels the ‘human’ as being itself a composition of minerals more closely related to those we might imagine as inert or beyond human substance. Zhu approaches art making as a space in which to begin processing these relations.