DIMIN is pleased to present Underbelly Bloom, Ye Zhu’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Zhu’s new relief paintings and sculptures explore how the slow, subterranean work of memory, experience, history, and debris accumulates and ultimately sprouts unexpected forms. The title suggests that beneath every structure, whether it's environmental, spiritual, or personal, lies a living substratum where transformation begins and new forms emerge. Here, the “bloom” is not a flourish but the result of layered gestures, residues, and sediments that quietly press upward. Zhu’s work alludes to the unseen transformations that follow what we abandon, inherit, or unknowingly carry: the afterlife of refuse, the whispers of lineage, and the shared logic between roots and circuits. His works operate as both elegy and insistence, urging attention toward the burdens we carry and the strange, generative forms they eventually become.
Throughout Underbelly Bloom, Zhu cultivates hybrid topographies where botanical and technological forms enmesh. Microchips meet vines, plastics mimic root systems, and devotional architectures dissolve into debris. The resulting compositions feel at once ancient and futuristic, sacred and industrial. In Zhu’s recent work, painting becomes a form of sedimentation: pigment is scraped, cut, rebuilt, and layered with materials that seem excavated rather than applied. Relief surfaces hover between architecture and organism, where growth and decay function as parallel movements and each surface behaves like soil. Merging the emotional register of painting with the tactile immediacy of sculptural objects, Zhu constructs substrates from pigment, circuitry, vine, and cast fragments—forms that serve simultaneously as image and relic. These hybrid materials act as seeds of meaning, carrying the residue of globalization and the persistence of belief amid decay.
In the wall installation Death Before Dying and Rebirth Before Death, transformation unfolds through relief and sculptural forms that follow a caterpillar’s metamorphosis into a moth. Zhu’s process mirrors natural cycles of creation, dissolution, and renewal, treating materiality as a conduit between embodied experience and spiritual inquiry. Works such as The Cosmos of Seeds and Ego Decay deepen this exploration, revealing how materials shift, fuse, and accumulate layered meaning and possibilities of being. Technological fragments become root systems, toys and industrial remnants assume devotional resonance, and pigments pulse with embedded histories. Smaller reliefs offer meditative intimacy, while larger panels alter spatial perception, making architecture feel animate and matter imbued with memory.
For Zhu, the question of what blooms from the underbelly is inseparable from lineage and lived experience. Born in Taishan, China and raised in Brooklyn, he moves through inherited and constructed worlds shaped by labor, faith, displacement, and care. These histories surface in hybrid materials and forms that resist simple categorization. His work asks how personal and collective pasts persist within the built environment—and how they may be composted into new understandings of identity and belief. Drawing from Western and Eastern lineages, including Duchamp’s readymades, Tishan Hsu’s explorations of embodiment and technology, and traditions of classical painting, abstraction, and Chinese nature painting, Zhu advances contemporary painting toward a materially entangled global interconnectedness.
Based in Brooklyn, NY, Zhu is an interdisciplinary artist focused on painting, public art, and social practice. He has presented solo exhibitions at DIMIN (2023) and Harkawik (2022) in New York, NY; at Moskowitz Bayse (2021) in Los Angeles, CA; and at the Andrew Freedman Home in the Bronx, NY (2022). His work has been included in group exhibitions at The Sugar Hill Museum in Harlem, NY (2022–23), Gavlak Gallery in Los Angeles (2023), Galerie Marguo in Paris, Harper’s (2023, 2021), and James Fuentes (2021) in New York. Over the past year (2024–25), he completed residencies at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), Dieu Donné Workspace in Brooklyn, and Wave Hill in the Bronx. Zhu has created numerous public projects, including a tribute installation for healthcare workers at the Yale School of Medicine (2022), a billboard project with Kingsgate Project Space in London (2021), A Universe in Strafford, NH (2021), and CONSTELLATION on Governors Island (2021), featured in The New York Times. He is a founding member of Haven Arts Park (2020–2023), an initiative dedicated to transforming contaminated land into an art park, and was a recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant (2022–2023).
