Aleza Zheng

Aleza Zheng’s paintings don’t so much depict stories as invite you into the moment just before — or after — something changes. Born in 1999 in Shenyang, China and now based in Los Angeles, Zheng works across oil, ink, linen, and silk, blending elements of autofiction, fairytale, and observation into layered, often translucent surfaces. Her visual world is full of literary ghosts and poetic echoes — roses, the female form, floating curtains, animals — yet her brush seems equally concerned with the quiet undoings of those symbols. What looks soft is also sharp. What appears whole is almost always in the midst of transformation.

"Empathy is a device I use to understand disorientation… to re-enchant a world that’s constantly splitting."

Drawing on a background in both Eastern and Western aesthetics, Zheng works with a dream logic that blends painterly figuration with translucent layering. Whether she’s working with silk that casts shadow on wall or oil on linen that melts the boundary between body and backdrop, her process plays with illusion and rupture. She often begins with autofictional material — diary-like notations, aphorisms, fragments of story — and lets them unravel into archetype and ambiguity. Through her eyes, objects become anthropomorphic, bodies become landscapes, and a single frame can hold both fragility and mythic charge.

"I’m interested in breaking the idyll. The surface, the illusion — it always gives way. But that break is where meaning slips in."

In Curtain Parts (2024), Zheng offers a visual bildungsroman of her own. A nude figure leans into a golden curtain while another — childlike, studious — hunches over a glowing surface. A pair of chess pieces remain mid-game. Above, birds swirl and cages hang in hazy contradiction, implying freedom and confinement at once. Executed in oil on linen, the painting is atmospheric and emotionally charged, evoking a dreamlike logic where the self is always dividing — or doubling. It’s a study in soft unraveling, a meditation on knowledge, exposure, and the quiet choreography of growing up.

After Fable & Form, Zheng returns to Sabbatikal with a new series that continues her inquiry into enchantment, illusion, and the quiet undoing of form. This follows her European debut with Shazar Gallery in Milan, where her paintings introduced audiences to her autofictional and poetic approach.

Follow Aleza:Website | Instagram