Jie Zhang: Painting Gardens as Thresholds of Time

Between Thorns and Light: The Quiet Force of Jie Zhang’s Canvases

Jie Zhang’s paintings carry the quiet gravity of lived time: not linear, not fixed, but layered like petals, like tides.

Jie Zhang. London based contemporary artist painting garden themes. — **Jie Zhang**: The Thorn I oil on canvas 80x70cm 2025. Image courtesy of the artist

Her recent works, shown at The Koppel Project in London, emerge from the tension between memory and transformation, always returning to a central image - the garden.

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Jie Zhang. green bluel painting of a garden in detail — **Jie Zhang**: The Ghost of Tulips oil on canvas 80x60cm 2024. Image courtesy of the artist

Born in China and now based in London, Zhang’s practice weaves painting and poetry into one continuous voice.

installation vie artworks exhibition — **Jie Zhang**: White flowers I oil on canvas 140x130cm. Exhibition view. Image courtesy of the artist

She grew up surrounded by gardens, moving often between homes, landscapes, and social expectations.

That restlessness sharpened her sensitivity to place, to growth, and to cycles of belonging and estrangement. Poetry became her language of doubt, painting her way of holding contradiction.

2 blue paintings by the artist hanging on the wall — **Jie Zhang**: Dense Forest oil on canvas 60x40cm 2025. Image courtesy of the artist

The canvases themselves oscillate between figuration and abstraction: thickets of brushwork dissolve into luminous openings; dark, thorned zones give way to fragile bursts of bloom.

**Jie Zhang:** The Thorn II oil on canvas 80x70cm 2022.jpg

In works such as Dense Forest I & II (2025) and Garden (2025), Zhang refuses the false clarity of categories. These are not landscapes, nor pure abstraction. They are metaphors built from the textures of reality - moments of vulnerability and resilience made visible.

**Jie Zhang:** Garden oil on canvas 152x121cm 2025. Image courtesy the artist

The garden functions less as motif than as structure: a symbolic terrain linking past, present, and imagined futures.

Here, time is felt not as chronology but as rhythm, a slow accumulation of marks. Wrinkles, layers, waves: painting as a form of lived repetition. Each work embodies both fragility and force, softness and thorn.

Jie Zhang light pastel colors, water color of a woman — **Jie Zhang :** Dense Forest I, oil on canvas 2025. Image courtesy of the artist

Her references extend beyond the autobiographical. Buddhist cosmology and natural science surface in the work, not as illustrations but as worldviews.

They frame the paintings as spaces of healing and reflection, where universal conditions - mortality, change, freedom - remain visible.

Jie Zhang deep forest painting in blue — **Jie Zhang :** Dense Forest II oil on canvas 2025. Image courtesy of the artist

Zhang’s paintings do not attempt to resolve contradictions; instead, they keep them alive, rendering doubt itself a generative space.

Jie Zhang garden painting in green with a woman that looks like the artist — **Jie Zhang :** Was, am, will be, In the garden 2023 oil on canvas 60x50cm. Image courtesy of the artist

What lingers in the room is atmosphere: the hush of a threshold, the way color seems to hesitate before deepening, the sense of an image about to dissolve.

These are works that resist spectacle.

Jie Zhang:painting of nature in darker purple like colors. Image courtesy of the artist — **Jie Zhang:** "Untitled" charcoal, water, oil, pastel on paper 70x50cm. Image courtesy of the artist

Their intensity lies in duration, the longer you stay, the more they begin to breathe.In a cultural moment dominated by immediacy, Zhang’s practice insists on slowness.