Zhanhong Liao: Echo of Time at Pulchri Studio
Zhanhong Liao – Echo of Time
With Echo of Time, Zhanhong Liao celebrates her 25th anniversary as a member of Pulchri Studio and her 60th birthday. This retrospective exhibition offers a rich and multifaceted view of her artistic development over the past decades.
Zhanhong Liao (Guangzhou, 1965) has lived and worked in the Netherlands since the late 1990s. She studied at the City College of Manchester, spent time in London and New York, and eventually settled in Vlaardingen. Since then, her work has been shown in many places both in the Netherlands and abroad. Her oeuvre—ranging from paintings, collages, and book objects to installations, performances, and digital art—explores themes such as identity, cultural roots, family relationships, and the connection between humans and nature.
At the heart of this exhibition is the idea of time: how memories, traditions, and personal experiences evolve, shift, and intertwine with the present. Her work reflects how, as both an artist and a human being, one moves between cultures—learning, letting go, and connecting.
From early diary-like objects in which she questioned her identity between East and West through text, image, and material, to recent monumental rice-paper scrolls inspired by Taoist wisdoms, Zhanhong’s work is always deeply personal yet simultaneously relatable and universal. She employs a wide range of techniques to shape each new theme in a fitting way, with Eastern influences and her use of intense color remaining constant threads.
In the Mesdagzaal, Zhanhong presents small, medium, and very large works from the past 25 years. These reveal her fascination with both intricate detail and sweeping gestures. Themes such as connectedness, family, nature, and inner peace recur in every work—whether in realistic portraits of her parents, abstract paintings, watercolors, performances, or sculptural objects.
Echo of Time is an honest, poetic, and visually rich reflection on an oeuvre centered on connection—with others, with oneself, and with the world around us.
