This transcript is taken from two interviews conducted in June 2025 at Yusi Zang's Gertrude Contemporary studio in Preston South. Born in Beijing, Zang moved to Naarm / Melbourne in 2014 to study Fine Arts at Monash University, and has since solidified a practice across painting and sculpture, exhibiting at an impressive schedule in artist-run, commercial, and institutional spaces. Currently a Gertrude studio artist, Zang is working towards her major Glasshouse exhibition this November. She is represented by Animal House Fine Arts.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
ED: I wanted to start off by discussing a painting included in the Gertrude Studio 2024 exhibition, Rain Marks on Factory Wall. It strikes me as deceptively restrained. I'm picturing you sitting very upright at the easel, fluid paint mimicking the perfectly incidental fluid of the reference picture. There's an awareness of the contrivance of replication.
YZ: I would say this is one of the less painful paintings I've made. It's an abstract painting nature made on a surface for me. When I painted it, I kept losing track of the raindrops, so I think they're not exactly the same as the photo.
ED: In the studio and losing track of where you are, you commit yourself to follow the image's instructions, while there's a doubt of whether it even matters; whether anyone would be able to tell if you had made it up. Does it matter to you that you get lost?
YZ: I try to copy it, but I don't think it's one hundred percent. It matters to the degree that it's not totally messed up. You read the title, and that's how you know what it's of, but I don't think the viewer would be able to figure it out if they didn't have the title. The painting is really just to myself; I know what I'm doing, and I know what it is.
ED: Last time we talked, you said your work has been adopting a more 'clinical gaze.' That's the phrase that you used. This describes a shift from painting images you personally romanticise, to a responsibility to pay attention to images with a degree of distance?
YZ: Yes, maybe in the last year or two. My earlier paintings were very meaningful to me. When I look at them, I feel attached, I think of the old days and get a bit emotional. Some of the photos I've been working with now, when I find them in my iCloud, I can't even think of when I took them.
ED: It's your photo, but you feel a degree removed from yourself?
YZ: It's almost like a piece of memory that's not so important, but I still want to give a good look at it. I think I found the phrase 'clinical gaze' in a book on Agnes Martin; that's how the writer described her work. It's always in the back of my mind. I want to get close to the truth — the truth of the image or the truth of that moment. It's manipulated by myself, too.
ED: Even if you're aiming to be clinical, it's still a highly constructed vision, both in the photo and in the manipulation of paint. I'm thinking of your painting The Process is Ugly, where the touch of the paint corresponds to how one would touch a tender wound. There's a transfer of hand through the brush, which I would propose comes from painting after such a personal photo. The image of The Process is Ugly is held within a very tight space.
YZ: It's compressing a lot of sensation to a very constrained surface. I think my standard is that my work needs to be honest, it needs to be the same as myself.
ED: I've been thinking about your work in relation to a series called Various Responses by Mutlu Çerkez (1964–2005), paintings that transcribe call-in replies to the artist's telephone dating profile. The subjects are so self-conscious in their documentation: the strange position of naming their interests, what they look like, certain attributes. They also refer to Çerkez's own self-presentation, and what they think of him being an artist. These people are exhibiting themselves in hope for reception, giving a bit of themselves over to him, and he's adopted it fully in these works with all the ums and ahs. I feel like this structure of self-consciousness plays out in your work, with the very personal subject matter you use, and with the vulnerability implicit in the exhibition of your work. You've also said to me that a lot of the paintings you did last year, you felt unsatisfied with.
YZ: I was taught — or maybe this is just my own sense — that as an artist, you should try to look confident, that it would benefit your career to be the kind of artist that can articulate their practice well. I'm not one of those. Painting is so private to me. I'm looking at the marks I leave; it's like having to face myself. I think in showing self-consciousness, I'm being honest. I don't want to hide it or think it's a weakness.
ED: Çerkez's practice involved future-dating all of his works to be remade at a later time, a gesture that stands by the quality of his work into the future. To my mind this is an incredibly confident act that opens him up to a lot of vulnerability. It responds to a position of making art, where, by the time you move on to the next piece, you hate the last one — you're always chasing something. Exhibiting unsatisfying works opens up a futurity to your practice. Where you are at now is just one point on a continuum. You're going through a process.
YZ: I would be happy if the audience noticed my paintings getting better, or even in myself… If I started to feel less guilty or self-conscious, less embarrassed in showing them, I think that would be a success. I feel like the audience to my work, facing my work… There's always no words. There's something to do with my work that makes people shut down or something, they don't know what to say.
ED: Your work can be quite visceral. There's a pinpoint reason you're drawn to that subject matter that no viewer could perfectly understand. I read your work as something you do for yourself, and the exhibition as an act of generosity. Maybe the public output, exposure to the audience, is the artistic action?
YZ: Exhibitions feel quite different to making the work. When it's done, it's hanging on the wall, and I'm standing in the space… I don't feel like I own the work anymore. It's like it's leaving me.
ED: These sights you've photographed, they become important because you recorded it, and important again because you've painted it. You've charged up the image.[1] All through, it's a highly subjective activity. This comes about in your sculptures as well, where they're not inaccessible materials, but I feel that their source is from deep within you. It's an impressive balance of vulnerability, a level of openness that keeps yourself safe.
YZ: My work is very deeply from my heart, but I've lived as a human for more than thirty years now. A part of me is trained to suit this society, so I'm able to keep it to a degree that's not too personal. I think coming to a different society to live is like relearning how to be an individual. I've had to go through it twice. When you're young, you grow up, it's different. But when you're old and you try to grow up again, it's very... I think it had an impact on me, really.
ED: It's like your Instagram page: You're relatively open on there, but it mostly serves as a clear representation of your practice. Public self-expression has become a distinct form of labour — with social media, there is profit to be made of what we do online, what we disclose.
YZ: When I post on Instagram stories, often I feel that I have no one else to say these things to. Çerkez's Various Responses does remind me of my Instagram posts. I'm not expecting a response, or if there was one, it wouldn't be sufficient.
ED: You have a recurring theme of consumption, especially in your sculptures, but moving into your paintings as well. I wonder where it relates to your thoughts on art?
YZ: Consumption… I think my paintings, and the rest of my works, are about surviving.
ED: You've mentioned the millet used in your First World Problem sculptures being a remedy for a sore stomach. Food has a high utility value as well as a high pleasure value. Phone photography can be utilitarian, and the initial objects of your readymades tend to be quite practical. I'm wondering if through your work you're instilling the material with pleasure, or at least satisfaction.
YZ: Art is a thing that I grip on to, I can't think of another reason to be alive. I have a very blurred boundary between consumption for pleasure and for necessity. Food is also a material, it's direct. Painting satisfies a part of me where I want to put labour in something, prove that I spent a lot of time doing this. I don't feel confident if something is really quick. Maybe it's because I feel like I have a hard life, so my work has to be hard too.
ED: But then you give yourself breaks, like Sour: Skittles squished to the shelves at Working at Heights.
YZ: It was like a holiday.
ED: Between the paintings and the readymades, you form a kind of work-life balance.
YZ: I'm thinking about showing sculptures for my upcoming Gertrude Glasshouse show… I have an idea in my mind, but the fact my sculptures don't have much pain in them makes me struggle. I've been feeling that maybe this show is too important, that it's not a holiday.
ED: At some level within both our practices, painting is an investment of sheer hours and labour. We've both been employed in circumstances where the labour of painting is paid by the hour. And paintings are very commodified objects: if you sell a painting, you learn what it's worth. These worldly pressures of time and money cannot be removed from the process, and are borne by the work.
YZ: I'm not sure if it's a gender thing, or if it's individual. I think a lot of artists appreciate simplicity in contemporary art. I also appreciate that, but not in my own practice.
ED: Contemporary capitalism demands that you are never in stasis, which necessitates a constant awareness of how you present yourself. You seem to work with that mode of self-presentation, following the rule of labour investment while not giving yourself too much away.
YZ: I'm thinking about the rare situation where I don't follow this rule: the bitter melon work I made for the Gertrude Studios 2024 show, Swallow This Bitterness. It's close to what we might call 'Contemporary Art Daily' artwork, it's kind of effortless. When I produce that kind of work, I feel that people like it more for some reason. It gives me a very complicated feeling, like I'm trying to play smart here, as if it's a persona of me.
ED: Being casual, laissez-faire… Does it make you feel that painting is a 'bad investment'?
YZ: No, I don't think so. People like the bitter melon work because they feel eased, whereas painting can be so serious.
ED: I feel like painting does ask something of the viewer. The paintings need the viewer to know you found the task worthwhile, even fruitful. You were willing to follow this picture to the end, and put yourself into it.
YZ: It reminds me of something John Nixon once said: that no one would look at a painting more than fifteen minutes in an exhibition, so you shouldn't spend more than fifteen minutes on a painting. It requires something for the audience to look at the painting, it's a hard thing to do.
ED: Maybe to paint with the cheekiness of Swallow This Bitterness would be to linger on a joke for too long. Painting raindrops on a wall, your commitment becomes so clear.
YZ: Swallow This Bitterness looks very easy, but I spent a few hundred on the material, and I had to replace it every second day, touching the slimy, rotten melon.
ED: And that labour doesn't read as clearly as the labour of a painting. It's invisible (besides when you posted about it on your Instagram story).
YZ: I didn't expect it! It got rotten even before the opening. Which I liked— I was thinking yes, this is my work. I need to replace it, I've got labour to do.
[1] Something Kat Botten said in an artist talk with Jack Mannix at MOM Gallery, the day before my second interview with Yusi. Kat talked of looking at a photo in your phone camera roll for forty seconds to 'charge up the image', and thus make it art.