Louise Zhang
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Public Art
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2026
Commissioned by The Galleries & Dot Dot Dash
For this project with The Galeries, created to coincide with Lunar New Year, Louise has worked on silk, embracing the material’s fluidity, translucence, and sensitivity to touch. Long associated with Chinese culture, ceremony, and exchange, silk functions as both a symbolic and material foundation for the works. Its softness allows colour, texture, and form to shift and breathe, reflecting ideas of renewal, transformation, and continuity central to the Lunar calendar.
Botanical and symbolic motifs emerge and dissolve across the silk surface, each carrying layered meaning. Peaches reference immortality and longevity, ginkgo leaves symbolise hope, and lotus pads speak to harmony. Small dotted forms suggest seeds, evoking fertility, growth, and future potential, while oranges appear as a symbol of luck and prosperity. These elements are woven together through subtle contrasts in tone and texture, creating moments of tension within an overall sense of balance.
Through this body of work, Louise considers how material, image, and cultural symbolism can operate together. The works invite close looking and quiet reflection, marking Lunar New Year as both a celebration and a pause, a moment where beauty, unease, and meaning coexist, and where the act of looking becomes an experience of contemplation and intention.
Photo: Studio La Tessa.