Acrylic on linen canvas In 2025, I travelled alone to my hometown Chaoyang — my first trip back in 7 years. I found myself in an unfamiliar position: an adult guest in my own family, so far removed by space and time that I could observe my relatives as individual entities for the first time, watching their daily exchanges and gestures as expressions of care, responsibility, pride, and hierarchy. Throughout my month in China, I noticed over and over the intertwining of care and control, love and ownership, fragility and possession in both interpersonal relationships and public life. At what point can one claim themself a victim if love must hurt? What are the invisible contracts that underlie intimacy? Grown out of these observations, this series of six small paintings serves as vignettes of tenderness and containment. Taken together, these works invite viewers to reflect on the ways we hold and are held, and to feel both the comfort and unease within the fragile enclosures of everyday life.

Ketty Haolin Zhang

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Ketty Haolin Zhang 🇨🇳🇨🇦 is an emerging interdisciplinary artist. Informed by her diasporic experience as a 1.5-generation immigrant, her art practice navigates her relationship with placelessness, liminal space and (non)belonging in a hyper-globalized world. She is interested in creating works that embody both closeness and distance - the simultaneous desire to belong and to resist being defined.