Artist Biography
B. 2001 Brooklyn, NY
Mei Zheng is a first-generation, non-binary, Fujianese American artist-designer-educator born and based in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Rooted and working with community, Zheng grounds their practice in a commitment to love, a love that heals slowly and intentionally.
Working across sculpture, food, printmaking, and textiles, they craft new considerations in memory work and archival practice through the built environment and rituals they inhabit. Mei invites reflexive conversations on one's transnational and diasporic histories, familial storytelling conventions, and newfound intimacies found in remaking. Zheng seeks to bring people closer across distance, to recognize shared humanness and the act of remembrance.
They hold an MA in Art Education from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and a BFA in Industrial Design from RISD. Mei has exhibited work internationally with A Space Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Gallery 263, Cambridge, MA; Steinbeisser, Netherlands; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; Mather Homestead, Darien, CT, amongst others. They also have featured writing in literary arts and food publications like MOLD Magazine and the RISD Museum.
Artist Statement
My practice unfolds at the intersection of memory work, ritual, and the diasporic (re)imagination. As a first-generation, non-binary, Fujianese American artist, I work through sculpture, food, printmaking, and textiles to trace the residues of individual trauma and collective memory, those embedded in architecture, in everyday gestures, and in the rituals we inherit and remake.
I approach love not as sentiment, but as a methodology to build upon our current technologies, slow, deliberate, and communal. Through this lens, I engage the built and felt environments of my disentangled upbringing between Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and Fujian, China, where communities are shaped by familial migration, labor, and layered resilience. Within these textures, I turn toward the postcolonial archival instinct as both a form of survival and a soft resistance. Memory, in this process, is not still; it is iterative and relational. What do we choose to remember, and what do we forget? What emerges when memory is allowed to shift?
At the core of my practice is a pedagogical belief in transformation that begins within. As Grace Lee Boggs reminds us, “Transform yourself to transform the world.” I hold this as both a provocation and grounding principle. In the spaces I cultivate, with and alongside others, art becomes a site of shared reflection, co-learning, and deep relational practice. I understand teaching and making as interconnected acts of care, ones that invite us to sit with our own histories and those of the communities we move through.
I am drawn to the spaces where personal history converges with cultural myth, where a taste, a fabric, a gesture becomes a vessel for something larger than the self. Through this, I investigate how memory is carried, fractured, and possibly transformed, how it moves between people, and what it asks of us. My work becomes a place to hold grief and celebration at once: to name absence, and also to gather.
Impromptu portrait: Ziare Greene (2024).Mandarin trees from Awaji, Japan (2023).Hondamachi, Kanazawa (2023).