Leah Ke Yi Zheng Distills Structure into Sensation

In ‘Machine(s)’, her first solo exhibition at Layr, Wuyishan-born, Chicago-based artist Leah Ke Yi Zheng continues to confront the conventional role of canvas as passive support in works whose physical shape is integral to their meaning and whose mutable, translucent surfaces are imbued with an almost-bodily presence.

By stretching silk over handmade wooden frames to create irregular, parallelogram-shaped supports, Zheng transforms her paintings into delicate, sensuous objects. Unlike the substantial layers of paint that accumulate in traditional oil-on-canvas works, the artist’s acrylic-on-silk technique embraces a combination of brush control and fluidity, as the vibrant pigment seeps into the silk rather than resting on its surface. In this way, Zheng’s paintings do not merely hold an image; they absorb, stain and register traces of her every movement. The result is a surface that does not assert its materiality as a solid plane but, rather, behaves like an interface: porous and reactive. This aspect is particularly evident in ‘Machine(s)’, where Zheng suspends two of her works, Untitled (Machine) (2024) and Untitled (2025), in mid-air. Visible from both sides, and positioned just half a metre from the large storefront windows of this ground-floor gallery space in a former shopping mall, these paintings interact with shifting light, shadows and reflections throughout the day, further reinforcing their unstable, nearly-animate quality.

Oscillating between representation and abstraction, Untitled (Machine) and Untitled (Machine) (2025) depict what appear to be geometric compositions of thick horizontal and vertical lines. The former, positioned at the window, features a pale red-yellow palette of acrylic on silk over a pine stretcher, while the latter, created with two layers of silk over a cherrywood stretcher, is veiled in a light-green hue with shimmering yellow tones. Incorporating principles from the I Ching (Book of Changes, c.1,000–750 BCE), an ancient Chinese divination system based on the non-linear logic of yin-yang dualities and transformation, Zheng adopts the hexagram motifs to communicate a set of interpretative meanings. The greenish-yellow Untitled (Machine), for example, features hexagram 49 – the symbol for revolution. 

In the bluish Untitled (Machine) (2024), a thematic fusion takes place: barely noticeable at first glance, hexagram 55, the symbol for abundance, appears in the background, joined by a satellite with an antenna-like device. This image attests to Zheng’s ongoing fascination with early modern technology and its mechanical components. The first machine-like form to enter her artistic vocabulary was the fusee; a conical wheel used in antique watches to regulate their movement. The form appears throughout this exhibition in various iterations – notably in the more figurative and vividly colourful Untitled (2024). Here, two fusees integrate with patches of colour that appear and dissolve alongside abstract silhouettes, one resembling a phantasmagoria, creating a dynamic composition. Slightly off-balance in its parallelogram format, the work seems to be in search of its own equilibrium.

As Carl Jung explained in his 1949 foreword to the English translation of the I Ching, ‘events evolve one out of another’ via the ‘diametrically opposed’ principles of causality and synchronicity, which he describes as either a linear chain of cause and effect or as an interconnected coincidence of events in space and time. In Zheng’s paintings, layered contrasts and subtle shifts embody both principles simultaneously. Inviting viewers to look beyond the surface into underlying structures of reality, whether guided by logic or chance (or both), her works suggest that sense is not simply to be deciphered but must also be felt and experienced.

Leah Ke Yi Zheng, ‘Machine(s)’ is on view at Layr, Vienna, until 10 May 

_{Main image: Leah Ke Yi Zheng, Leibniz’s Machine, 2024, acrylic on silk over mahogany stretcher, 47 × 93.4 × 4.7 cm. Courtesy: the artist & Layr, Vienna; photograph: Kunst-Dokumentation.com}