Mei Ruowen, born in 1995 in Haikou, China, studied at the Basel Academy of Art and Design (FHNW HGK MFA) from 2023 to 2025; studied in the Sculpture Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts from 2014 to 2019; and went to Tama Art University in Japan as an exchange student in 2018. currently lives and works in Chongqing.

Zuo Qianyang considers her artistic practice a detective-like investigation into images and symbols. Taking personal memory as a clue and embodied experience as an entry point, she returns to those “sites of events” where language has failed and history has obscured what happened, reconstructing, exposing, and transforming the structural traumas embedded in private experience. She is particularly interested in metaphors within narratives of love, and examines the political allegories embedded in popular cultural forms in East Asia, such as shōjo manga and online fiction. Her work explores how “romance” is woven into a cultural script and how, through different media, it shapes contemporary desire.

Zuo Qianyang works across painting, installation, and other media. She frequently uses unconventional painting materials, including red and black ballpoint pens and correction fluid, while appropriating the visual language of Japanese shōjo manga popular in the 1990s. Through sweet, kitsch imagery and emotionally charged compositions, she constructs a nightmarish, dreamlike world in which the latent violence and danger of ordinary life are subtly embedded.

Recent exhibitions include: The Female Butcher on A Rainy Night, CLC Gallery Venture, Beijing (2026); Archives of A Denying Heart, der TANK HGK, Basel, Switzerland (2025), Unweave a Rainbow, Madain Gallery, Shanghai, China (2024); Duende!, Basel Atelier Mondial, Switzerland (2024); Seeing is inviting: the art and life of MULAN and her friends, FEI Art museum, Guangzhou, China (2022); “The Cave of Silken Web”, Synnika, Frankfurt, Germany (2022).