SF/Arts Curator Insight

Chinese-born Bay Area painter Ruxue Zhang's surreal oil paintings are sometimes straight up strange: red toenails painted on a pair of pink pumps floating on a purple cloud bank. (Yes, please.) Zhang often finds weirdness in the mundane: a water goblet reflected in a mirror, a vase of flowers seen through faceted frosted glass, the edge of a swimming pool. Why these images generate such a persistently weird vibe remains unclear, but I didn't mind the artist poking around inside my subconscious. Perhaps it's not what you are looking at, but how you see that makes all the difference.