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Yi Zhu in the Global Best Creative Awards Hall of Fame —Artist
- Global Best Creative Awards
- 30 ott
- Tempo di lettura: 5 min
Yi Zhu has been awarded the Gold Prize in Art, Painting with the work “Hello it’s me” at the Global Best Creative Awards 2025. The artwork explores the concept of a “new species,” drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome theory to challenge traditional visual structures and essentialist interpretations.
Artist Resume of Yi Zhu
A Chinese Painter of Expressionism in Painting Focused on Deconstruction and Reconstruction
Deconstruct the material and reconstruct the spiritual.
Mr. Yi Zhu is an artist who grew up amid the great social transformations of China. He maintains a constantly evolving creative attitude. Having witnessed the dramatic changes in China's economic structure and the era of profound shifts, these tremendous changes have shaped his worldview.
In his early years, he engaged in printmaking and illustration, creating numerous works with unique visual compositions. During his tenure in the commercial design field, Mr. Yi Zhu led his own design company: he designed for the offline market of China's advertising industry, developed point-of-sale (POS) experiences, and worked on partial packaging designs and vivid POS product experience designs for an international fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) beverage company in the Chinese market. The design company under his leadership won the "Best Creativity Award" and "Best Supplier Award" from the Chinese subsidiary of this internationally renowned brand.
When confronted with various social phenomena in the commercial sector, as well as the struggles and aspirations of human nature amid competition, Mr. Yi Zhu created a great number of prints and oil paintings, interpreting his creative worldview through deconstructive and reconstructive painterly expressionism. During the global pandemic, driven by his insights into life, observations of the ups and downs of life amid the pandemic, and other factors, Mr. Yi Zhu began to create a large quantity of oil paintings and prints while under movement restrictions. The underlying logic of life is breathing—and due to social factors, this breathing takes on an attitude, as well as the tension and contractility of life. This stirred in him a strong desire to express such perceptions of life. Life should not be suppressed; the essence of life is freedom. Only through the freedom of cognition can there be the freedom of life.
In his early years, Mr. Yi Zhu created illustrations for the literary works of Mr. Wang Meng and Mr. Shen Congwen—two renowned literary giants in China. His illustrations not only won high praise from the authors but also received the authors' signatures on the illustrations upon the works' publication.
Hello it's me won the Gold Award in the Painting Category of the GBCA Global Best Creative Awards 2025 - Season 2.
Through heterogeneous connections and open-ended visual language, “Hello it’s me” investigates how existence and meaning are generated, emphasizing horizontal relationships, cognitive liberation, and the emergence of new perceptual possibilities. The work invites individual interpretation, encouraging viewers to experience unique emotional and conceptual responses within an evolving framework of life, identity, and imagination.
Concept Overview
From Generation to Existence, Hello it's me! - I Am a New Species
I am a new species. Artist Yi Zhu has brought me into this world. Hello it's me.
Hello it’s me.: My existence breaks the old visual language and explores a way to realize the possibility of a new species' life from generation to existence. Hello it's me—I am a liberation of your cognitive concepts.
The "Rhizome" theory proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their co-authored work Mille Plateaux: Capitalisme et Schizophrénie (English title: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia) has influenced the creative thinking behind my work Hello it's me.
As a new species artistic figure, hello it's me has no fixed "interpretive answer" (rejecting the arborescent "essentialism"). Instead, through its connections with "Rhizome Theory" (a philosophical concept), "audiences' cognitive experiences" (individual units), and "the rebellion against old visual languages" (professional groups), it enables each audience member to develop a unique understanding—some perceive the possibility of new life, while others feel the liberation of cognition.
Through the image of a new species created in a heterogeneous (rather than homogeneously derivative) manner, the work Hello it's me advocates that all forms of life are equal, and there is no relationship where higher-level life dominates lower-level life — the connections within the work are horizontal, not vertical. It emphasizes the transcendence of space, time, materiality, and category.
Desire:
The new species in the work Hello it's me represents a new mode of existence for expanding living spaces. This desire is the desire to exist (to stay alive).
Generation:
The existence of life is a continuous process of generation. Generation itself is the meaning of existence, and the significance of the generation of the work Hello it's me lies in the emergence and existence of a new species.
The work Hello it's me does not maintain existing structures; instead, it connects to new modes of existence through heterogeneous choices.
The work Hello it's me itself connects to "the generative process of meaning" rather than "the transmission of meaning."
Deconstruction：
The purpose of deconstructing "Hello It's Me" is not merely to disassemble a rigid structural system, but to explore the possibility of connecting heterogeneous "rhizomatic" life roots.
Reconstruction:
The work Hello it's me reconstructs visual logic. Different viewers, in different times and spaces, will perceive different emotions and sensations from it—and this breaks the fixed perception of meaning imposed by appearances, enabling the acquisition of new spiritual image visual perception symbols at the level of imagination.
From Generation to Existence:
The rhizomatic generativity of the work Hello it's me does not rely on "homogeneous connections" (the "homogeneous reproduction" of arborescent thought); instead, it depends on "heterogeneous connections"—connections between points of different fields and different natures. Only through such connections can existing boundaries be broken and an entirely new state of existence be generated.
As an artistic image of a "new species," the work Hello it's me has no fixed "interpretive answer" (rejecting the arborescent "essentialism"). Instead, through its connections with "Rhizome Theory" (the meaning of generation and existence), "audiences' cognitive experiences" (individuals), and "the rebellion against old visual languages" (the industry), it enables each audience member to develop unique visual perceptions and sensory impressions of the image.
Finally, I would like to clarify: This is the thinking behind my creation of Hello it's me. What the oil painting ultimately presents is for viewing. Inside the frame lies my subjective expression rooted in idealist metaphysics, while outside the frame exists the objective perception of the viewers.
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Other works by Yi Zhu:
