The pursuit of beauty is human instinct. Perhaps many girls had sneaked into their mothers’ room when they were little, put on lipsticks and blushers, and tried on the other dazzling array of makeups on vanities. With vivid imagination, artist Zhou Ying creates colourful scenery with cosmetics. The cartoonish human bodies together with other asymmetric elements, the whole settings invite the characters into a surrealistic fantasy world, in a similar way as Alice in Wonderland. These figures without pupils have also created an intriguing atmosphere.

Zhou Ying believes that we all grew up living in a fairytale-like world concocted by mass media. Everything in advertisements, television dramas and films are so perfect that deserves our pursuit. As we grow up we realise reality is not what we think it is. That kind of perfection only exists in the media world. Possibly resembling the characters in the paintings whose eyes have no pupil – which are known as the ‘soul of the eyes’ – we can relinquish wisdom and revel in fairy tales happily ever after.

Born in 1983, Zhou Ying is a female artist from Chongqing, Sichuan. Zhou obtained her Bachelor's and Master's Degree from the Oil Painting Department of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2007 and 2010 respectively, and graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts with a Ph.D. in 2013. Zhou’s works have been exhibited widely in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Miami.

In the past few years of artistic career, Zhou Ying was trying several different approaches in developing her painting styles and concepts. The flatness of the dimensions and the vibrant colours have long been the vocabularies of Zhou Ying. The traditional realistic portrayal is also not the direction she pursues, but to a certain extent a sense of three-dimensionality is conveyed. With several simple layers of different tones, it draws together the two dimensions and three dimensions, which are supposed to be the opposites. Zhou’s works look three-dimensional yet plane at the same time, as if there is some kind of balance.

Image: © Zhou Ying, EC Gallery