Stella Zhang was born in Beijing, China. She graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1989 with a bachelor’s degree. In 1990, she moved to Japan and earned an MFA from Tokyo University of the Arts in 1996. Since 2003, she has been living and working in San Francisco, USA. Her works have been exhibited in museums and galleries across China, the United States, and Japan, and are held in the collections of various art institutions. She has published six solo art books, and her works and projects have been featured in The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and various art media.
In 2016, she held a solo exhibition at Art Basel Hong Kong, and she has served as an artist-in-residence and visiting lecturer at Stanford University. Stella Zhang’s practice focuses on the interplay between emotional experience, psychological states, and identity perception. She seeks to build dialogues between personal narratives and broader cultural contexts. Often working with humble, easily overlooked materials, she employs a minimalist yet nuanced visual language to create quiet, introspective spaces of perception that evoke resonance and reflection. In her creative process, she intentionally maintains openness in form and language, emphasizing perceptual sensitivity and honesty of expression to respond to evolving internal structures and mental states.