Zhen Guo: Embracing Kali: 225 West 17th Street

Ethan Cohen Gallery is pleased to present Embracing Kali, the gallery’s first solo exhibition of Zhen Guo. Zhen Guo (b. 1955, Shandong Province, China) is a New York–based artist whose work fuses Chinese visual traditions with a distinctly contemporary, feminist urgency. Growing up at the dawn of the post-Mao era, Zhen Guo’s early life was shaped by political upheaval, interrupted schooling, and state-assigned labor before she emerged as one of the rare elite talents admitted to China’s top art academies, China Academy of Art, and Shandong Art School. There, she mastered the foundational disciplines of sketching, ink painting, oil painting, the full classical toolkit expected of a serious artist. From the outset, her figurative work insisted on individuality and emotional truth at a time when such concerns were often politically fraught. Even in early paintings and collaged works from the 1980s, Zhen tested the boundaries between personal narrative and public image-making, combining observation with symbolism and an emerging interest in the psychological.

 

In 1986, Zhen immigrated to the United States, enduring years of economic precarity and gendered expectations that would become central to her mature practice. After her divorce in the mid-1990s, she reclaimed her voice and redirected her discipline toward an expansive artistic practice that integrates the depth of Chinese tradition with her own modern sensibility. A superb ink painter fluent in the thousand-year legacy of guohua, Zhen also explored sculptural forms that addressed womanhood, inner transformation, and the complexities of identity. Across series that channel grief, rage, resilience, and solidarity, she treats the body, often her own, as both subject and metaphor, addressing the structures that silence women while asserting the possibility of transformation.

 

Most recently, Zhen taught herself the demanding craft of tufting, an audacious leap into a medium far removed from the conventions of classical training. It is here, in her Kali series, that her practice reaches a breakthrough. Zhen’s mastery of visualization, combined with her exceptional hand skills, results in large scale, mixed-media tufted works that are both visually commanding and technically impeccable. These pieces are singular, and reveal an artist stepping fully into her power.

 

In this series, Zhen turns to the goddess Kali as both symbol and vessel: a figure who embodies tenderness and ferocity, creation and destruction, maternal nurture and uncompromising strength. Often misunderstood through patriarchal imagery that equates women’s power with threat or ugliness, Kali is frequently reduced to a figure of destruction. Zhen reclaims her instead as a protector of the innocent and a force of justice: a spiritual figure who subjugates demons, confronts injustice, and transforms fear into courage. For Zhen, Kali becomes a contemporary archetype for feminine women’s resilience and self-possession, a figure to be embraced rather than feared, and a symbol of liberation for those who dare to challenge imposed limits.

 

Zhen’s Kali works extend her lifelong engagement with identity and women’s lived experience. Responding to the ongoing realities of gendered violence, repression, and the erosion of hard-won freedoms, Zhen likens Kali as a “spiritual Wonder Woman” for contemporary life: a rallying force for fearlessness, voice, and self-determination.

 

Today, Zhen Guo stands as an artist claiming her freedom: personal, emotional, and creative. She invites us into a world where tradition and innovation, discipline and instinct, vulnerability and strength coexist in profound harmony. Her perseverance, her courage, and her belief in art as a vessel for truth have brought her to this moment.