Featured Artwork Title: “Scattered memories #122”
Medium: Mixed media on canvas, acrylic, ink, rice paper rolls and rings, 12 x 12 inches
Year: 2024
Introducing our Color Palette of the Month artist, Xinyu Zhang!
Meet our June Color Palette Artist, Xinyu Zhang and her unconventional journey to becoming an artist. After earning a Bachelor of Law degree from Peking University in China, she worked as an editor at a major press in Beijing, where she discovered a passion for book cover design.
Self-taught in the field, she became a popular book designer, and it was during this period that her love for visual art truly blossomed.
In 2002, Zhang entered the MFA program in Visual Communications at the University of Arizona and has since been fully immersed in fine art, exploring a wide range of disciplines.
She was an artist-in-residence at Centrum in the spring and held a solo exhibition titled Wander Around at the University of Arizona Museum of Art in 2019.
Her work has been recognized as a finalist in several prestigious competitions, including the Taiwan International Artist Grand Prize Competition (2019), the Arizona Biennial (2018), and the Chelsea International Fine Art Competition (2015).
Her current work focuses on deepening the exploration of how the past and present can coexist and transform through material and memory.
When it comes to choosing color palettes, I tend to gravitate toward two extremes: either a very limited palette or a highly saturated one. For the limited palette, I typically use basic tones like white, black, and gray, combined with a single bright accent color—such as cantaloupe. On the other end of the spectrum, I embrace a full range of rich, vibrant hues, aiming for maximum color intensity.
Xinyu Zhang on how she chooses her color palettes.
