“Ascesis of the immediate, of the lightning bolt.”

--Henri Michaux, Ideograms in China (New York:New Directions, 2002)

The Cicada is most widely seen, then, as a sonic entity. For Qionghui Zou , however, the cicada is, by an act of invigorating, generative expansion—a shape, an informing visual symbol and, ultimately, an almost mythic presence. As a visual glyph, the cicada quickens, animates, expands and deepens the artist’s visual work. The cicada is the genie in the lamp of her production.

During the last few years, within the trajectory of her art, Qionghui Zou has accessed the cicada, listened to it, looked at it, researched it, engaged it, elevated it, displaced it, transformed it and, in the end, given it another kind of light. She has engaged in a double act: she has kept the creature’s insect-ness while, at the same time, subjecting it to a cultural metamorphosis that lends it dimensions too metamorphic, too allegorical, to be confined within any limiting, end-stopped exegesis.

For me, Qionghui Zou’s art is fuelled by a modality of that kind of “dynamic, abstract kind of grasp.” It is a grasp, powered by the para-mythic presence of the cicada, that stretches and bends her art from earth to infinity, from the fecund past of story and legend to the furious present of the contemporary art world, in all its roaring, competitive, shifting, dangerous, joyful rolling towards some endlessly elusive closure.

Qionghui Zou’s “grasp” of the cicada, her persuasive employment of it in her art, her embrace of both the cicada’s archetypally shaped life-cycle and her acquisition of the insect’s properties, behaviours and history, have given her a cunning and, at the same time, reverent way of tethering her expressiveness to her immediate aesthetic needs which, without the anchoring of the cicada and its cultural carapace, could have spun out into the free-fall of painterly facture and pigmented excitement for their own sake. Qionghui Zou’s “grasp” of the cicada is a grasp of both insect and idea, a simultaneous claiming of both natural history and its superstructure of myth and meaning. Qionghui Zou is the Lady with the Lamp, and the lamp is the cicada.

The fact is, I was privileged to explore a small selection of the artist’s work at an art gallery called Index G in Toronto, Canada, on the Saturday afternoon of August 6, 2016. It was an exhibition of short duration (August 4-7), set up essentially as a kind of soiree or seminar—more an occasion than an exhibition. There was to be a panel discussion, to which my wife and I were invited to participate. We did so, or at least we attempted to do so, with the kind assistance of two patient translators. Our different languages were arguably an obstacle—albeit a colourful, highly-textured obstacle—but not an impediment. We talked enthusiastically for hours, as if we were speaking some third language that we all knew perfectly well.

I remember first being transfixed (something that doesn’t happen to me very often) by a quite small (40cm x 30cm), vertical painting on the gallery wall near the entrance. It was a seething little maelstrom of reds, yellows, golds, pinks and sparingly deployed blues, all thronging together, colours close-packed and violently contingent to one another. What was so exhilarating about this tiny, furnace-like painting was how clean and bright and alive each dab, stroke, smear and coagulation of pigment remained while contributing to the whole tumultuous work —how discreetly it maintained itself in such passionate juxtaposition to the pigmented incidents all around it. Nothing had gone muddy or slack. If there were procedural anomalies, they had clearly been useful and had worked out for the best. Freshness reigned everywhere within what suddenly seemed like the vastness of a very small painting.

Transported by the thickly pigmented beauty of her painting, it took me a little time to come to the cicadas themselves. The insects, as it turns out, informed the paintings deeply—organically, metaphorically, anthropologically, mythologically, anagogically—serving neither as merely image, illustration or compositional cue (or texture or décor), though of course they do provide all of that as well, along the way. The artist is more centrally absorbed by and fiercely attentive to (as she puts it in an artist’s statement) the “continuity and rebirth of [the cicada’s] lifecycle,” and employs its “miraculous ecdysis” [the process of shedding the old skin (in reptiles) or casting off the outer cuticle (in insects and other arthropods)] as the engine that drives the “life narrative symbol system” within her production, providing her with both an extended mythic structure that thrusts like an armature through her work and also a “visual vocabulary” that quickens her paintings into a rush of epic expressiveness.

Qionghui Zou’s cicada-images populate her canvases, tincture them, lend them the aura of an inescapable articulation. One of the most remarkable aspects of their presence in her work, however, is that they don’t get lost in it. Not really. The cicadas are manifested as shadows, emplacements, embeddings, impressions (like footprints in the sand, like tracks in the snow), traces, strands, recollections, exertions of memory, acts of quickening contemplation. Even if you don’t always see them readily in the paintings (they are often as elusive as articles of faith), you come to admit of their presence, acknowledge it, abide by it, depend upon it.. The fact is, the cicada’s frequent occlusion in the maelstroms of the artist’s work bespeaks its own vitality.

The cicada’s shell (husk, slough) is what is left behind of the insect’s musical, tree-bound life, shucked off when the creature dies and heads for regeneration.. The shell is a “saved remnant.” It is what remains behind (“all passion spent”). Like a miniaturization of any persuasive religious mystic, the cicada must lose its life (it must “shuffle off this mortal coil,” to quote Shakespeare’s Hamlet) in order to gain transcendence. Like all deities, major and minor, the cicada dies in order to be reborn. Qionghui Zou harvests the insects’shells and folds them, imagistically speaking, into her paintings where, now reiterated (as if the cicada were in the actual earth, waiting to reappear), still smouldering with life and meaning, the shell is reformulated into art in the same way every artist ultimately leaves behind his/her own eloquence and inspiration to the judgements of history and time. Art is the trace. Art is what is left behind.

In general, Qionghui Zou is an outstanding artist. In her original artwork, she gives the cicada and her artworks a unique artistic life. And with her continuous creation, her art continues to flourish.

Gary Michael Dault

a writer, artist and art critic in Toronto，Canada

January 5, 2017