“Inner Weather”: the quiet emotional register of Yishi and Zhenzhen’s London show
Inner Weather, a two-artist exhibition bringing together new work by Yishi and Zhenzhen, remains on view at Noho Studios in London through August 30, with an extended evening viewing on August 27. The private view took place August 24.
Zhenzhen — who also goes by Jen — trained at Central Saint Martins, where she completed an MA in Fine Art, and her practice has stayed remarkably consistent since: painting, and painting alone, in a narrow, almost meditative register. Her subject is women caught in states that tend to slip past unnoticed — resting, thinking, stretched out in the grass, simply breathing. The work moves between two registers at once: a tender seriousness folded into soft, blush-toned female figures, and the smaller, more private thoughts that hum quietly beneath everyday life. Everything she paints, by her own account, is pulled from something real, just slowed down enough to actually be seen.
One piece on view is a tight, cropped close-up of a bare torso — a red ribbon, tied in a bow at the throat, trails down toward a white dove cradled gently between two sets of hands, an envelope sealed with wax resting just below. The composition works almost like a still life nested inside a portrait: warm, fleshy pink pushed up against the dove’s cold white and the ribbon’s single graphic line of red. The gesture of the hands holding the bird reads as protective and withheld at once — as if whatever message the dove is carrying matters more than the body doing the holding. That’s the artist’s method in miniature: nothing stated outright, just enough left in the gap between gestures for the viewer to name the feeling themselves.
Zhenzhen’s studio practice is inseparable from her life in London — motherhood, long walks, a habit of collecting fleeting states of being that later become paintings. The work functions less as a statement than as a kind of visual diary, a way of holding onto tenderness that would otherwise disappear into the ordinary rhythm of a day.
