Excited to finally share pics from my thesis exhibition a few weeks ago. One of the works, BLOOM, a hand-threaded metal bead curtain shaped like a tunnel greenhouse, is the largest piece I’ve fabricated so far. 🌱🧮🌿🪻
BLOOM
16 x 10’
Steel, ionized steel, LED therapy light, paint
During my graduate studies, I’ve been researching how decorative surfaces function as shifting indicators of desirability, metamorphosis, and threat. This has led me to think about the adaptability of the natural world, and how its meanings shift across iconography and objects. I became interested in how the movement of bodies, plants, and decorative forms overlap—how aesthetics and empire are materially and historically entangled. By merging motifs of transformation, adornment, and the natural world with industrial materials, I’m had hoped to trace lineage of surface metamorphosis—how ornament has encoded bodies, objects, and environments over time.
The pattern on the structure began as a loose drawing of a garden made up of plants that were imported to the U.S. for ornamental purposes and later classified as invasive. Through the beading process, that imagery became abstracted into something more camouflage-like. Inside the structure, an LED therapy light—an object that promises a metamorphosis of the skin, body, and psyche— casts shadows, reflections and hue shifts that alter how the pattern is seen.
The greenhouse functions as a portal—a double-sided screen, a threshold, and a spotlight—made up of thousands of small reflections and movements. If surface is treated as something knowable, I’m interested in how it might instead evade and unsettle perception—shimmering, vibrating, and constantly shifting between what it reveals and what it conceals.
Thank you to @patgarciajr_ for these pics. Endless thanks to the crew of angels who helped me move and hoist this bb. All my love to my beloved friends who talked through ideas and came out to see the show 🌼
“Can we live here forever?”
“我们可以一直活在这里吗?”
Based on a memory, a fantasy, a dream, a portal, a mirror, and a photograph I took as a child at Mount Lu/庐山. 🌄
📷 by @raidendingo .
Shellie Zhang’s @shelliezhang Thesis installation, BLOOM, for GOOD FORM (Group I) @yaleschoolofart
BLOOM
16 x 10’
Steel, ionized steel, LED therapy light, paint
#shelliezhang #yalesculpture
Shellie Zhang | Surface Tension
Patel Brown is pleased to announce an exhibition of Shellie Zhang’s recent sculptural works.
🕸️💚🕸️
The three works in Surface Tension explore Zhang’s research into the interconnections between cinematic surfaces, ornamentation, and skin.
᠃ ⚘᠂ ⚘ ˚ Shellie Zhang⚘ ᠂ ⚘ ᠃
Please join us on Saturday, May 2nd, from 3 -5pm at the opening reception. 🕸️21 Wade Ave.🕸️
We look forward to seeing & celebrating with you!
🕸️💚💚🕸️💚💚🕸️💚💚🕸️💚💚🕸️💚💚🕸️💚
#ShellieZhang #surfacetension #sculpture #exhibitonopening #patelbrown
Other half of thesis works from the past month are a series wall pieces
🦋🪭👁️🪡🪽
Flush, Blush, Bruise Nos. 1-3 💛💚💙
Various sizes
Yellow zinc plated steel, steel, stainless steel earrings, glass
Chemical patinaed steel, steel, stainless steel earrings, flower frogs
Chemical patinated steel, steel, sewing pins, contact lenses, resin
This work came from looking at wing surfaces in the Peabody Museum’s entomology department, a large decorative folding fan found in Value Village and a newfound obsession with patinas.
Merging natural forms with the decorative remnants of human use, the metal surfaces are heat-treated, and coloured through applied patinas—an alchemical process that transforms the metal. These butterfly-like forms are held together by pins and piercings, and embellished with objects of display and capture—flower frogs, cosplay contact lenses, fishing hooks, sewing pins and metal rods.
Thinking about mecha bodies, sticky symbols, how surfaces act as a site of transmission that registers what lies beneath; how skin can flush, bruise, stain, or morph in response to pressure, touch, or puncture.
Pics by @patgarciajr_
Tonight is the night! To celebrate Salon 44 opening, Executive Director Alana Traficante highlights Shellie Zhang’s Centrepiece as her top pick! Join us tonight from 7:00-10:00PM to view the works in the collection available for purchase.
There are several aspects to Shellie Zhang’s practice that I find compelling, but one in particular is her deft approach to still life photography. She composes vignettes of highly aesthetic yet seemingly simple everyday objects to evoke decadence and luxury. But the objects serve prompts for deeper exploration. With Centerpiece (2025), she swaps out the expected decorative victorian wallpaper for a patterned cupboard-liner backdrop, a repeating image that evokes memories of my grandmother’s cutlery drawer; punctuates the foreground with little clippings of baran, the green, grass-shaped, dividers used in Japanese cooking to separate foods and flavours; and grounds the arrangement with a bundle of tomato seedlings that stand in the place of an ornate bouquet. Centerpiece (2025) taps into memories of many different kitchens, tabletops, cuisines and curios, and with this work, Shellie makes connections between how we ascribe value to objects, and people, in relation to them.
I first met Shellie in 2017, when her work was included in the group exhibition In Pursuit of The Perfect Pose at Gallery 44, and I have continued to follow the evolution of her practice ever since. Last year, I nominated Shellie for the Hnaytshyn Foundation’s Saunderson Prize at what felt like a really important juncture in her career—she had just made the leap to begin a two-year MFA in the Sculpture program at Yale School of Art—and she was named a Finalist! We were so excited at the news that before it was publicly announced, we secretly popped a little bottle of bubbles behind a flowering vine at a friend’s backyard barbeque—the components of that scene would have made a beautiful still life too <3
- Alana Traficante, Executive Director, Gallery 44
Visit the link in our bio to see a full list of participating artists!
This week I presented my MFA thesis work alongside four talented artists and celebrated another cycle around the sun. Studio is a mess. Heart and mind are full. Excited for this new chapter. 🪡🦋🌿🧮📍🪭🏞️💅👁️ see you Friday at the opening
Introducing SHELLIE ZHANG for GOOD FORM I, the Yale Sculpture MFA Thesis Exhibition for 2026.
GOOD FORM I runs from February 28 - March 9. Please join us for an opening reception on Friday, March 6 from 6-8 pm.
Shellie Zhang is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto and New Haven. Through a diverse range of media, Zhang explores how histories of translation, migration, and memory leave traces and impressions. Her work examines the processes of integration and assimilation, the ways culture is learned, sustained, and negotiated, how manifestations of these ideas relate to lived experiences and how symbols and icons are remembered and preserved. Zhang’s recent work investigates the surface as a charged site where connections between the decorative, ornamentation, cinematic surfaces, and skin are projected, learned, and inherited. Working across materials such as light, metal, found objects, and glass, she explores how these surfaces operate as perceptual thresholds, embedded with anxieties around gender, race, and sexuality beneath their ornate veneers. Drawing on symbols from both natural and urban worlds, she examines how decorative surfaces carry the potential to transform and metamorphose from their encrusted histories. Recent projects have focused on elusive surfaces in the nature and hostile ornamentals—plants that were imported for decorative purposes that have since been classified as threatening or invasive. Through researching the adaptability of the natural world, she is interested in presenting decorative surfaces as a site of inscrutability—one that eludes full knowability and instead suggests a depth or vibration beneath what is often perceived as flat or hollow.
Graphic Design Identity by @az.fang@hanajelovsek
