About

Diane Zhou is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She uses comics, paintings, sculptures, and screens to flesh out the contradictions of Chinese diasporic experience through kimokawaii (gross-cute) aesthetics. She hoards cartoon patterned fabrics and plastic toys born in Chinese factories, combining them with oil and acrylic paintings, handmade stuffed animals, and sculpted clay objects such as teeth, eyes, and tongues. This layering of handcrafted items with industrially mass-produced commodities creates a collision of expectations between the human that seeks comfort from these objects, and the stark conditions of globalized production and circulation that undergird these objects’ existence. Her work has been shown at Gowanus ArtWalk, Transmitter Gallery, Ortega y Gasset, From Here to Sunday, and Gowanus Open Studios.

animated envelope with text morphing into a smile and back again zzzhou.diane@gmail.com

a little monkey smiling and hopping around @monkeymittens

an emoji at a desk doing work Find her design/illustration work here.

pikachu wearing a bug catcher hat and net Crawling bug script on homepage is from here.

Creatures whose Chinese names sound the same as mine:

Jia Jia the panda’s 37th birthday. She is next to a large cake and seems to be smiling.

Jia Jia the interactive robot being wheeled in by a procession of human men.