About

Fuyuan Zhou is an artist working across painting and sculpture, currently completing a BFA in Sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design. He is based in Providence, Rhode Island.

His practice begins with structure: how forms are established, how they remain stable, and how they change through material, time, and external conditions. Early works approached structure as something that could be constructed and controlled. Over time, this interest shifted toward what happens after a structure has already existed, when surfaces accumulate traces, systems loosen, and forms begin to reorganize.

Recent paintings draw from ancient Chinese bronzes, inscriptions, weathered stone carvings, corrosion, and metallic residue. Rather than reproducing these objects, Zhou reworks fragments of their visual and material logic through abstraction, repetition, and erosion. The painted surface becomes a place where memory persists through change.

His sculpture practice develops independently through questions of balance, gravity, construction, and material behavior. Painting and sculpture share these concerns without illustrating one another. Across both practices, Zhou considers the conditions through which forms emerge, endure, deteriorate, and become something else. Transformation is understood as an ongoing negotiation between a structure and the forces acting upon it.