Lisa Zhu Portfolio
Title: Family Dinner
Year: 2025
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimension: 14 in x 11 in
Description: Loneliness doesn’t always mean that you’re alone, it means surrounded by everyone and still feeling lonely. At my family dinner, each one of us has troubles that we leave behind coming to the table. As we eat, the smiles on our faces are the only thing that unites us. The colors of the day are our own, divided by a common acknowledgement that we will never truly understand each other.
Title: Wai Po (Grandmother)
Year: 2025
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimension: 14 in x 11 in
Title: After Swim Practice
Year: 2025
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimension: 14 in x 11 in
Descriptions: Returning home from their 2 hour swimming practice, my brothers walk back smiling, expectant of the warm meal and company awaiting them.
Brother 1: “I waited all afternoon just so we could walk home together.”
Brother 2: “Me too. This is my favorite part of the day.”
Title: The Journey Home
Year: 2025
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimension: 14 in x 11 in
Descriptions: “How were your classes?”
“Which piece are you working on?”
Title: Still Life Studies
Year: 2025
Medium: Colored pencil and watercolor on paper
Dimension: 12 in x 26 in
Description: These are the materiality of my grandma (top), brothers (middle), and dad's (bottom) passions and what they're passionate about: how they need the tools to achieve their goals, instruments of their personal success and of their spirit. Still lives are impactful because ordinary objects carry weight beyond themselves and the stories they tell are whispers, suggestions of narratives and echoes of our precious past and reflections of our glimmering futures.
Title: Childhood Memories
Year: 2025
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimension: 11 in x 14 in
Description: Ever since my parents divorced, I had to live with my grandpa. I’ve always wished to live with my family, not just with my grandpa. Everytime my parents take me out with my brother once in a while, I feel like an outsider, quiet, yet still hoping to find a sense of belonging.
Title: Escapism
Year: 2024
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimension: 16 in x 20 in
Description: She is surrounded by animals and nature to evoke a feeling of safety, protection and relief. There, she is able to escape the constraints of her life, dream without limitation, and live freely. Butterflies flutter above and rest on her head, the stillness in transformation, reminders that there will always be opportunities to transform and evolve, just as a caterpillar metamorphizes into a butterfly. This world is more than an escape, it's a reminder that deep happiness is not in the external, real world, but internally in how we find comfort.
Title: Grief
Year: 2024
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimension: 11 in x 14 in
Description: This was inspired by the death of my best friend Emily. I decided not to paint her seized by illness, but the version she never got to be, a free and beautiful ballerina. Grief taught me about the importance of shared vulnerability: creating spaces where people can access their pain and find solace in the stories of others. I hoped to offer comfort to those navigating loss and remind them that our loved ones live on in the memories we keep and the lives we lead.
Title: What Music Brings Me
Year: 2024
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimension: 11 in x 14 in
Description: Music to me means something that goes beyond just a hobby, it often feels like a place where it is able to bring me to somewhere private and focus only on myself where the outside world is unable to affect me.
Title: Study of Pomegranates in Oil
Year: 2024
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimension: 20 in x 16 in
Title: Window Watching
Year: 2025
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimension: 11 in x 14 in
Description: I never knew what others are going through without them telling me directly. I often feel like I’m the unlucky one that has to go through hardships, but these experiences are just part of being human. “Window Watching” is a synthesis of that experience of stepping outside of myself, a glance, a glimpse at various moments of other people’s lives as a momentary witness.
Title: Portrait in Blue and Yellow
Year: 2025
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimension: 11 in x 14 in
Description: Portrait in Blue and Yellow is the response to the previous piece. As an artist, I get to control how people are seeing me on the canvas. By having my line of sight directed at the audience, I’m both acknowledging that I’m being watched and watching my audience back.
Title: Bed Rotting
Year: 2025
Medium: Oil on canvas with acrylic gel medium
Dimension: 18 in x 24 in
Description: I think back to the times that I couldn’t get out of bed. Time seems to simultaneously speed up and slow down; speeding up in hindsight because nothing was accomplished and slowing down in the moment for the only things turning over in my head. The once comforting bedsheets turn against me, crass and rough as familiarity, once blissful, turns bitter. What once provided me solace has become a burden.
Title: Sleeplessness
Year: 2025
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimension: 18 in x 24 in
Description: Most days of the week I’m unable to go to sleep late at night sitting deep in my thoughts, the stress and fear of the future frightens me, but I try to count sheep, and it slowly calms me down and brings me into a dream inside my bed.
Title: Dinner, Dinner
Year: 2025
Medium: Video made with Projector
Dimension: 72 in x 24 in
Description: The act of eating has transitioned from consumption for the sake of survival and the sake of necessity to an act of habit informed by culture, routine, wellness, performance and a sisyphean reminder of our inherent mortality. In my piece, “Dinner Dinner,” I explore these themes through my daily meals: projecting and recording, a push and pull of 2 meals, representatives of centuries of refining these dishes, the technology, and the silent acts of capturing and remembering.
Title: Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner...
Year: 2025
Medium: Video made with Projector
Dimension: 72 in x 24 in
Description: From the first piece, upon reflection, my instinct guided me to this second piece, an insistence on the indulgences of necessity. This piece showcases the overlay of many multiples of meals taken over the course of 3 months to contrast the quietness and solemnity of its first iteration. In opposition, the cacophony of a meal experienced endlessly is as deafening as a lone meal is silent. “Dinner etc.” is the foil and breaks the sisyphean cycle in this regard because it rebels against monotony, against the insistent sameness and begins to grapple with the consequences when every meal, every moment, every grain of rice, meat, vegetable is all at once existent and arguing over each other.