Jianye Zou - Personal Works

Library is garden, 2025

Concert, 2025

雨(Rain), 2025

舞(Dancing), 2025

洋服(Dress), 2025

Picnic in spring, 2025

Falling..., 2025

Read as hunter in the woods, 2025

A series of illustrations born out of a fascination with graphic design: a dress shaped through the golden ratio, while a free-spirited young seamstress lies on the floor, devoting herself to its creation; a concert of simple, profound beauty bringing together people of different skin tones, heights, and genders, all united by music, a circle gathering together graceful ballet dancers...

This series explores layered textures, with a particular focus on recreating the visual qualities of riso printing, while also experimenting with a variety of printing methods and paper types. Jianye’s use of bright color is distinctive, and she often works with a deliberately limited color palette, relying instead on changes in shape, composition, texture, and line to complete each piece. For her, creative constraints often generate even greater inspiration.

The shape of lost afternoon, 2025

The Shape of Lost Afternoon was completed in a single night. It portrays an aimless afternoon inside an arbitrary room. The clock and the bouquet—its stems already cut—symbolize the gradual passing of time within the space, while the flowers in the water jar, together with the figure in the painting, remain silent in response.

In the context of rapid social development and increasingly demanding work, it seems that our pace of life no longer allows for a purposeless afternoon. Such an afternoon is often regarded as a negative, wasteful indulgence. Yet in truth, it is a precious experience. Faced with the relentless ticking of the clock, pausing to sit quietly through an afternoon becomes an honest encounter with oneself.

*Sold on Art on Paper art fair, NYC in 2025.

A gentle Squandering, 2025

What is the shape of the soul? Is it a bouquet of flowers, a piece of melting butter, or the reflection of a person in the mirror? Upon the blue, melancholic curtain, a silent figure simply sits—but even in her stillness, she is thinking. Her thoughts themselves give form to the shape of her soul. In a space where everything seems motionless, thought can be motionless too—or it may never stop moving at all. That, perhaps, is the essence of each soul’s shape: always shifting, always unique, existing somewhere between silence and endless motion.

Inly, 2026

Inly is Jianye’s response to the idea of soothing the inner self. In this work, the dolls that would normally stay quietly in the bedroom—objects meant to comfort and calm a person’s emotions—are now wrapped completely around the outside of the figure. These soft, plush toys become an unlikely form of armor, gently protecting a fragile inner soul. The figure itself appears translucent and softly glowing, as if made of something weightless and delicate. It relies on the dolls for protection, yet on an emotional level still holds them close within the deepest part of the heart.

Through this imagery, Jianye explores the idea of removing the dolls from their original setting, allowing them to exist beyond the bedroom and to accompany people everywhere. The dolls begin to take on a much larger role: they become quiet guardians of the inner world, always present, always offering comfort, even if they do not exist in the same dimension as the soul they are protecting. Their presence suggests that emotional support can follow a person anywhere, unrestricted by space or circumstance. And of course, if we speak not of the inner world but of the physical body instead, being wrapped in soft plush toys might even provide a small degree of protection from injury :)