A Winter Solstice Prayer | Ran Zhou
VOLTA New York 2020
On View: March 4th-8th, 2020
Metropolitan West, 639 West 46th Street @12th Avenue
New York, NY 10036
A map says to you, “Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.”
It says, “I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.”
And indeed you are. Were all the maps in this world destroyed and vanished under the
direction of some hand, each man would be blind again, each city be made a stranger to the next, each landmark becomes a meaningless signpost pointing to nothing.
— Beryl Markham, 1983
Considering map as a form of power-knowledge, Ran Zhou’s solo show A Winter
Solstice Prayer, focuses on deconstructing the “map” while reconstructing its relationship with the imaginary landscape. Zhou’s work asks us to reexamine the cultural implications of national boundaries on the migration issues happening worldwide. Using black and white as the base tone, this series combines mixed-media sculptures, paintings, and organic plants to tell different stories of migrants, family gatherings, and the trauma of illegal border crossings.
Projecting Zhou’s multi-cultural background onto a global vision, A Winter Solstice Prayer attempts to use a metaphorical language to balance the abstract and narrative, while exploring the tension between the heavy social reality and her Chinese poetic romance.
Ran Zhou is a visual artist based in Vancouver British Columbia, originally from China.
Her practice is influenced by her continued movement between Canada, China, and the United States. Getting rid of the specific national restrictions and traditional concepts, Ran’s art creates a subtle space located at crevices between the concept of contemporariness of culture and individual awareness within the vortex of globalization. For her past studio practice, she has addressed themes such as urban histories and memory deconstruction, solidification of the education system, child safety, and dynamics of migration flow. Zhou received her BFA with honors in visual arts and honors in art history from the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 2019. Zhou is represented by Z Gallery Arts, Canada.
