Bio

Yuhuan Zhang is a painter based in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. She received her BFA from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 2026 and holds a BA in linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley. Before devoting herself fully to her artistic practice, Zhang worked for many years as a translator, editor, and published author in the field of Chinese medicine and culture, with works published in English, French, and German. Her study of the cultural and philosophical roots of traditional Chinese medicine became fertile ground for her later artistic practice.

Working across oil, acrylic, ink, graphite, and mixed media, Zhang explores the relationship between beauty and impermanence, and our embodied experience of time and space. Her work oscillates between abstraction and figuration, using color, gesture, layering, erasure, and spatial division to investigate how forms emerge, transform, and disappear. Chinese philosophical traditions concerning the relationship between human beings, nature, time, and space have become an important force in the development of her work. These concerns find their most expansive expression in Genesis 7, a series of seven monumental eighteen-foot paintings.

Zhang also practices Sogetsu Ikebana and holds the fourth-grade teacher qualification under the flower name Uko. Rather than a separate practice, Ikebana is another artistic expression of her interest in impermanence, asymmetry, emptiness, and the changing relationship between the body, form, and surrounding space.