Zhen Studio

	Zhen Studio Booth Number: TBD Address: 97 Wakefield Street Rochester, New York 14621 Website: https://zhenillustration.wixsite.com/mysite/portfolio-collections/postcard-design Contact: zhenyisart@gmail.com Hi! I’m Zhen, a Taiwanese artist based in NY. I create my artwork using both digital and watercolor painting, and sometimes hand-torn paper collage. My subjects are inspired by Taiwanese culture, where I grew up, and the cozy little scenes from everyday life. I often take photos and turn them into happy cat illustrations. Each cat character reflects the footprints I’ve left behind in memories. My primary medium is watercolor. I use textures, nostalgic yellow-brownish colors, and narrative scenes to capture fleeting moments that evoke my childhood memories. Blending water with pigment allows me to gently bring blurry, sentimental fragments back to life. I often incorporate shredded paper into my work. These paper scraps pass through the shredder, transforming into fragments, just like how my early memories have begun to fade as I assimilate into a new culture. Through the process of cutting and reconstructing these scraps, I gradually reassemble the fragmented memories in my mind. To me, these pieces represent a transformation—a reimagining of memory through art.

Booth Number: TBD

Address:
97 Wakefield Street
Rochester, New York 14621

Website: https://zhenillustration.wixsite.com/mysite/portfolio-collections/postcard-design

Hi! I’m Zhen, a Taiwanese artist based in NY. I create my artwork using both digital and watercolor painting, and sometimes hand-torn paper collage. My subjects are inspired by Taiwanese culture, where I grew up, and the cozy little scenes from everyday life. I often take photos and turn them into happy cat illustrations. Each cat character reflects the footprints I’ve left behind in memories. My primary medium is watercolor. I use textures, nostalgic yellow-brownish colors, and narrative scenes to capture fleeting moments that evoke my childhood memories. Blending water with pigment allows me to gently bring blurry, sentimental fragments back to life. I often incorporate shredded paper into my work. These paper scraps pass through the shredder, transforming into fragments, just like how my early memories have begun to fade as I assimilate into a new culture. Through the process of cutting and reconstructing these scraps, I gradually reassemble the fragmented memories in my mind. To me, these pieces represent a transformation—a reimagining of memory through art.

Taiwan’s food culture has been deeply influenced by Japanese cuisine. The conveyor belt sushi culture in Taiwan began in 1996. Various types of sushi are placed on a rotating belt, allowing customers to freely pick their favorites as the dishes pass by. This unique dining experience quickly gained popularity in Taiwan, which inspired me to create a conveyor belt sushi cat restaurant using shredded paper. The walls are adorned with vintage Japanese print posters. Every small detail is carefully hand-painted in watercolor. This is also the final piece I created for this exhibition, and one of the reasons I chose to use shredded paper was to respond to the creative concept of the first piece in this series, which was also made using shredded paper.

This watercolor illustration depicts a scene from a Taiwanese night market. If you ask me what Taiwanese people value most, food is definitely one of the answers. Night markets in Taiwan are filled with delicious street food—among the most famous are fried chicken cutlets, stinky tofu, grilled squid, and milkshakes made from fresh milk and fruit juice. Due to the deep love for food, some popular food vendors even get interviewed on TV shows. I found this phenomenon fascinating, so I painted a scene of several cats enjoying tasty treats at the night market while being interviewed on a TV program.

This illustration captures the cozy charm of Zhuyue Hot Spring Resort in Yilan, Taiwan—a place close to my heart. Hot springs are a beloved tradition in Taiwan and one of my favorite pastimes. Since Rochester has no hot springs, I painted this piece to relive their warmth and nostalgia. Alongside my signature cats, I included capybaras and ducks! My inspiration came from visiting a capybara farm in Taiwan, where I learned that these gentle creatures love soaking in hot springs. The ducks, on the other hand, are a nod to my engineer boyfriend—who told me about the "rubber duck debugging" method coders use to solve problems. In this scene, I’ve mixed real and rubber ducks—can you tell the difference? 😆

I dont really have a picture of me in the process of making art. This is a screenshot of one of my recording preping for art vendors reels on my business account on Instagram (@zhenstudio.cat). In the picture, I am cutting my art print using my paper cutter.

Booth setup at the Clothesline 2025 at MAG.