Moliu Zhang’s drawings speak to the female experience, celebrating, distorting, and entrancing a life lived as a woman and mother. Sprouting heads with plants and more heads, Zhang’s figures stare out from various postures asking the viewer to consider positioning and exertion the characters must face in order to appear as they are. Twisting necks and backs with faces illustrate these women who peer at the viewer in a vacant, yet deeply meaningful way. Inspired by the work of Frida Kahlo as well as Japanese woodblock prints and comic books, Zhang’s work lands somewhere in between: dreamy, lucid and phantasmagorical.

Zhang lives and works in Beijing.