Genesis 7

Yuhuan Zhang
Painting series 2025 - 2026

My painting investigates how the visible emerges through time, disclosure, and concealment. Rather than presenting the world as fully given, I approach painting as a continual negotiation between appearance and what remains hidden, shaped by temporal and material conditions.

Drawing upon Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodied perception, Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of sensation, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s aesthetics of shadow, and the ancient Greek concept of kairos: the charged moment in which something becomes possible or begins to appear, I approach painting not as the representation of landscape, but as an event through which visibility continually forms and dissolves.

The Genesis 7 series consists of seven paintings: Chaos, Sky, Earth, and the four seasons. Together, they examine changing environmental conditions as distinct modes of perception rather than as symbolic images of nature. Each painting explores a particular mode of appearance. Chaos holds an accumulation of energy and possibility; Sky arises through light; Earth takes form from darkness; Spring unfolds from latency; Summer intensifies into sensation; Autumn manifests as maturity; and finally, Winter conceals and quiets.

Scale is also central to how these paintings operate. Each painting spans 18’ in length and 5.5’ feet in height, exceeding the viewer’s immediate field of vision and resisting being taken in as a single image. Drawing from Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of sensation as something that acts directly upon the body, I use scale to turn viewing into a physical encounter. The eye must travel and the body must move along the painting; color, gesture, density, and emptiness are experienced through duration rather than grasped all at once. The landscape therefore becomes less a scene to be observed than a field of sensation to be entered. As the viewer moves, different passages emerge and disappear, allowing perception itself to unfold in time.

These different modes of appearance also inform my painting process. The deliberately “unfinished” quality of the paintings is a refusal of complete disclosure. Layers remain visible, drips are left intact, earlier marks survive, edges dissolve, and transparent washes overlap. The movement between dense accumulation and open space creates an oscillation similar to the play between light and shadow. The painting reveals itself while simultaneously withholding itself. In this way, it preserves a sense of mystery.

Each painting is distinct, yet horizontal bars recur throughout the series, fragmenting the image. They do not merely divide pictorial space; they interrupt and alter the act of seeing. I think of them almost as screens opening within a Japanese room: through the interruption, the surrounding atmosphere becomes newly perceptible. These incisions also embody kairos - the instant in which something emerges from invisibility: a sunrise, fog lifting, snow melting, leaves changing, clouds breaking. Each season carries a different rhythm of revelation. They are not simply different states of weather, but different modes of disclosure.

For me, painting is not simply the art of making things visible. It is a way of negotiating the threshold where visibility and invisibility, time and sensation, continually exchange places. Merleau-Ponty reminds us that perception is always incomplete; what we see is inseparable from what remains unseen. Tanizaki gives this incompleteness an aesthetic dimension:

“We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.”