February 28, 2026 - April 25, 2026​

Opening Reception: 6 PM - 9 PM, Saturday, February 28th, 2026

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Hawthorn Contemporary is pleased to announce the opening of Ye Zhu’s solo exhibition CONTINUATIONS. Drawing upon the figure of the Arhat in Buddhism as a contemporary analogy for liminality, hybridity, and spirituality, artist Ye Zhu (b. 1986 in Taishan, China and based in New York, NY) assembles a body of work across relief painting and sculptural installation. For CONTINUATIONS, Zhu unearths a series he began during his MFA at Yale in 2020, while he was inquiring into religious iconography and its global transmission through aesthetic forms.  

 

While several of the original CONTINUATIONS reliefs were destroyed over the years, Zhu has remade all eight as large-scale mixed media works on panel for this exhibition. Each meditating body here is reconfigured in clay, fabric, paper, and subsequently takes on distinct formal characteristics and materialities. CONTINUATIONS # 8 for example, emulates a Matisse papercut in shades of orange, reclining amongst pools of shimmering buildup, an accent familiar to Zhu’s oeuvre, which often paints with the iridescent sheen of technological and religious accumulation: from ritual objects, such as dried tangerines on altar offerings, to the detritus of a parted iPhone. Upon entering the gallery, visitors encounter two relief paintings at a time on each wall while circumambulating a black, glossy, circular, floor structure flanked by dark and light motifs. Within this cosmic space, complementary dualities of being are held in relation.

 

A liminal, wandering figure with origins in Mahayana Buddhism, the Arhat thus became a pivotal reference for Zhu’s relief work, which draws inspiration from religious art and architecture as further technologies of knowledge transmission. Like the paths of Bodhisattvas and Buddhas who attain a kind of perfection, Arhats too have reached certain levels of attainment, however are susceptible to illusions and delusion and are able to regress. Not only were they added later to the spiritual lexicon in order to connect to everyday people and lay practitioners as Buddhism spread throughout Asia, their depictions do not adhere to rigid modes of representation the way depictions of Buddhas are beholden to. In this iconographic lineage, Zhu thus experiments with sacred figuration in times where binaries of spiritual and secular distort and grow, while reconfiguring the detritus of materialism and accrued capital, also another kind of religiosity. 

 

For Zhu, materiality and spiritually are ultimately not separate, just as the tangible and intangible manifest into art. As the artist notes, “I wanted to make Arhats that were materially based…sites for the convergence of historic and contemporary material and image culture.” To evoke Walter Benjamin, art is always embedded in the fabric of tradition. In this way, the objects in CONTINUATIONS weave together the intersecting realities of globalization and consumption through the intimacy of sentimental and sacred objects. As Benjamin wrote in his seminal and ever-relevant “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), “we know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual—first the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function.” 

 

Almost 100-years after Benjamin’s philosophical deduction, CONTINUATIONS reflects on the long umbilical histories of aesthetics and ascetics. Beginning with the religious object, ideas live on through art. These works by Zhu remind us how beliefs are transmitted across time and space, from internal to external, from body to body, mind to mind. They recall too, the sacredness held in our everyday functional objects, if treated as kin. And amidst Zhu’s compositions churning of samsara—the cycle of death and rebirth to which life in the material world is bound—each Arhat sits as a constant embodied presence through meditation, amidst an ever-changing world. 

 

By Danni Shen

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