Yang "Buurin" Yu-Zhen

Buurin Yu-Zhen (b. 1981) begins many of her interactions like this: “Can I ask you something? I want to know…” It is a key to her temperament as a person and artist. She is an inquisitive, lively, powerful woman who loves promoting her work to patrons. She is a studious and dedicated artist, almost exclusively focused on easel-sized acrylic painting (though her origami skills deserve mention as well).

Yu-Zhen busies herself daily with intricate still life or portrait painting. Constantly examining and refining her technique—investigating color and spatial relationships, light sources and shading—she is developing all the elements of an accomplished classical painter. But her loose, improvisatory work is as skillful. The Golden Gate Bridge rendered as two offset red ladders sketched over a hazy Marin landscape. The mother and child roughed-in with acrylics, the bare canvas showing beneath. These works show her learning the secret lessons of the masters: what to leave out and when to stop.