Mengdi Zha - Light and Dream
1st-25th April
I believe that there will be many lights in our lives that bring warmth and hope. These lights may come from the care of family, the companionship of friends, or the kindness of strangers. They may also come from the time we spend enjoying doing something when we are alone. These lights, little by little, become the most precious energy brought into our lives, enriching and making our lives colourful.
Light, for me, is hope and a quiet power, like the winter sun, gently warming every corner of the earth; it is the tranquillity and contentment in my heart. It is my love for life, my relentless pursuit of dreams, and the warmth and strength I feel from the care and protection of those around me.
I hope that each of us can find the light that brings warmth into our lives.
I selected These 6 scrolled rice paper painting works are form part of my 2025 Master of Fine Arts study graduation Portfolio painting project – Mengdi‘s graphic novel fantasy free art world building. All paintings are 185 * 78 in both the landscape and portrait versions.
I used these scrolls of rice paper as material for my painting practice , which was a 25th birthday special gift from my grandfather, who delivered them from China.
These paintings capture my daily life, the moments I immerse myself in doing something I love when I'm alone, the happy moments my mum cooks for me, and the moments I enjoy when I meet up with my friends for coffee. These are all lights that bring warmth and energy, enriching my life with more happiness.
- Mengdi Zha
About the Artist:
Mengdi Zha (born in China Jingdezhen, 2000) graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland in 2023, and completed postgraduate and Master's studies at the Elam School of Fine Arts in 2024 and 2025.
Her artistic practice involves "artistic autoethnographic research," exploring her feelings about her experiences of artistic education.
For Mengdi, Painting is the only window to express her inner self; it accompanies her to freely explore her current artistic journey, she learns about her feelings about the world. Her paintings record her life experiences, her feelings about her artistic education journey in China and New Zealand, and her intimate relationship with her mother, childhood memories, her current life, and moments of imagination. She says she builds her dreams in the world of her paintings. Even though memories may be fleeting, she was still able to capture the meaningful moments in her life through painting and present them eternally in the world of her paintings.
Mengdi‘s mother is an important character in her paintings because Mengdi’s mother saved mengdi from a mechanical art education, and helped Mengdi get a new start journey of artistic exploration at the Elam School of Fine Art.
Mengdi experienced the exam-oriented art education in high school, which made her feel like a robot in the studio, where she had to follow the teachers' and the school's instructions and only imitate and copy what was painted in the textbooks.
A standardised art education system deprives the art student of self-expression and the imaginary space to explore their own artistic creativity.
The process of creating paintings allows Mengdi to express and reconstruct new artistic values. Her artistic creativity enables her to explore diversity and the infinite possibilities it holds. She is committed to breaking through the exam-oriented art education she experienced in China and advocates that all art students freely express themselves in their works.
Mengdi's graphic novels, through painting as a medium, explore personal and cultural narrative constructs, creating a diverse and eco-style free artistic world based on her experiences and feelings, her current Elam artistic journey. She examines and critiques the issues within the traditional art education models that focus on skill-based, mechanical, and standardised and marginalised, gently and positively enveloping and poetically elevating this robot-style Chinese art education world model through inclusive and eco-style artistic creation.
In her work, the construction of this fantasy-free artistic world is not a simple beautification of reality, but a reshaping with a deeper meaning. It represents the reconstruction of Mengdi's artistic values and beliefs to give that artistic world a gentler, energetic body and to give the artistic world, which originally had issues and drawbacks, a new form.
This unique personal pictographic language in her paintings has given her work a distinctive personal style within the context of contemporary art. Her works not only touch upon individual emotional experiences but also reflect national and cultural phenomena on a broader level. Within the narrative framework of contemporary art, her works offer viewers a unique perceptual pathway, allowing them to experience and understand cultural meaning and social structures through a gentle embrace.