Shellie Zhang is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto and New Haven. Through a diverse range of media, Zhang explores how histories of translation, migration, and memory leave traces and impressions. Her work examines the processes of integration and assimilation, the ways culture is learned, sustained, and negotiated, how manifestations of these ideas relate to lived experiences and how symbols and icons are remembered and preserved. Influenced by oral and local histories, language, signage, and daily rituals, Zhang’s practice seeks to locate sacredness, resilience, and familiarity within the transformation of cultural symbols, forming new visual languages through hybridity.
Zhang’s recent work investigates the surface as a charged site where connections between the decorative ornamentation, cinematic surfaces, and skin are projected, learned, and inherited. Working across materials such as light, metal, found objects, and glass, she explores how these surfaces operate as perceptual thresholds, encrusted with historical projections and embedded with anxieties around gender, race, and sexuality beneath their ornate veneers. Drawing on symbols from both natural and urban worlds, she examines how decorative surfaces—laden with anxieties around gender, race, and sexuality beneath their ornate aesthetics—carry the potential to transform and metamorphose from their encrusted histories. Recent projects have focused on elusive surfaces in the nature and hostile ornamentals—plants that were imported for decorative purposes that have since been classified as threatening or invasive. Through researching the adaptability of the natural world, she is interested in presenting decorative surfaces as a site of inscrutability—one that eludes full knowability and instead suggests a depth or vibration beneath what is often perceived as flat or hollow.
Zhang has exhibited at venues including Asian Art Initiative (Philadelphia) and the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego. She is a recipient of grants such as the Toronto Arts Council’s Visual Projects grant, the Ontario Arts Council’s Visual Artists Creation Grant and the Canada Council’s Project Grant to Visual Artists. She is a member of EMILIA-AMALIA, an intergenerational feminist reading and writing group. Zhang was an Artist-in-Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2017), received the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Artist Award (2021), and was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award (2025). Her work is in public collections such as the Robert McLaughlin Gallery and the McMaster Museum of Art. Her work has been published in Frieze, Canadian Art, the Toronto Star, Blackflash Magazine, CBC Arts, and C Magazine. Zhang is a founding board member of the Toronto Chinatown Land Trust.