Essay by Heather Moqtaderi
Ye Zhu is an interdisciplinary artist focused on painting, public art, and social practice, based in Brooklyn, New York. His exhibition Underbelly Bloom opens at DIMIN Gallery on December 12, 2025. This essay is adapted from Past Present no. 5, available January 2026 on our web shop and select booksellers.
In the universe that Ye Zhu explores through sculptural paintings, the cosmic comingles with the ultraterrestrial. Snails trail across glistening muck. The spiral of a conch becomes an asteroid. In a piece titled Death Before Dying and Rebirth Before Death, a caterpillar inches across a psychedelic leaf. The moment is rendered at caterpillar scale, bringing us into conversation with a happening that might otherwise be hidden in the understory. I first saw this piece as part of Zhu’s residency at Wave Hill in the Bronx last winter. The residency offered Zhu a studio with direct access to nature in the form of the estate’s public garden. In his mansion-turned-studio, nature took over as his sculptural caterpillars meandered across the wood floor. At the center of this studio, he created a monumental easel out of branches and vines. A sculptural painting titled Procession, then a work-in-progress, rested on this easel, flanked by caterpillar guardians. Zhu’s work is recharging in this way, opening our minds to the natural togetherness of our human bodies and the insect realm.
Ye Zhu, Procession, 2025. Mixed media on panel. Approximately 48” x 36”.
In a conversation with Zhu during his Wave Hill residency, he described his branch-and-vine easel as a way of “shrinifying” the painting, breaking out of conventional ways of showing art. Throughout Zhu’s body of work, the shrine figures as an earthly interlocutor, bringing us not only into conversation with the beyond, but with the below–the matter that deteriorates to regenerate life. Circling within Procession, a bas relief pilgrimage of worshipers surrounds a golden rock, which was covered in gold leaf by collaborators at a Buddhist retreat. The painterly surface is modeled, taking on a haptic quality that visually stimulates a sense of touch. In The Cosmos of Seeds, Zhu suggests the form of an altar, embedded with a playful intermingling of organic and manmade detritus. Like all of Zhu’s sculptural paintings, looking closely evokes the satisfaction of beach combing, an activity that presents nature’s discarded wonders as gifts to be handheld. Stepping back once again, The Cosmos of Seeds reminds us of our embededness with this matter that matters. The blue-black earth blends upward to a Van Gogh yellow sky, an endless swirling of matter circulating between heaven and earth.
Triptych likewise brings together earthly and sacred forms. The piece’s three carved panels resemble islands that have broken apart as eons of ocean waters swell and recede. In my imaginary reading of the tripartite composition, giant seasnails dominate these islands in a time that is ancient, future, and present all at once. These amazing creatures navigate aquatic and terrestrial environments, their mucus enabling them to slither across surfaces or suction when confronted by wind or wave. Snail mucus has long been used for healing in traditional Chinese medicine. In this narrative it becomes a restorative salve to these lands that have attempted to separate man from mollusk. These creatures remind us that snail time is earth time. Future is past is present, all together in an infinite world
Underbelly Bloom is on view December 12 - February 7, 2026. DIMIN Gallery is located at 406 Broadway, Fl. 2, New York, NY 10013. To learn more, visit www.dimin.nyc.
