Z.Z. Wei

Z.Z. Wei was born in 1957 in Beijing, China. He began painting at a young age during China’s Cultural Revolution. After finishing his BFA in China in 1984, Wei was invited to the States in 1989 by the Washington State Centennial Commission to participate in the Pacific Rim Cultural Connection Project and to be a resident artist at Cornish College of the Arts. This led to his 1991 residency at Whitman College in Walla Walla, where the rural landscape transformed his life and artistic career. Wei has been a Washingtonian since first arriving in the U.S., traveling on the backroads of his home state and all over the country.

Z.Z. Wei’s paintings depict a living landscape, one where brushstrokes breathe with a rhythm that brings harmony between the land and humanity. Over his career, the passion Wei has for the rural landscape has become a metaphor for a more present way of life, removed from the fast-paced urgency of modernity. Wei examines the relationships between the natural environment and infrastructure, often rendering bridges, overpasses, roads and modes of transportation. While these elements symbolically move us ever-forward, time bends in Wei’s paintings. There is a longing that sends the viewer on our own journey, where color, sky, fields, and expanses of space allow us to travel into the deepest parts of ourselves.