About

Shellie Zhang (b. 1991, Beijing, China) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto and New Haven. Through a diverse range of media, Zhang explores how histories of translation, migration, and memory leave traces and impressions. Her work examines the processes of integration and assimilation, the ways culture is learned, sustained, and negotiated, how manifestations of these ideas relate to lived experiences and how symbols and icons are remembered, inherited and preserved. Zhang’s recent work investigates the surface as a charged site where connections between the decorative, ornamentation, glamour, and bodies are projected, learned, and inherited.. Working across materials such as light, metal, found objects, and glass, she explores how these surfaces operate as perceptual thresholds, embedded with anxieties around gender, race, and sexuality beneath their ornate veneers. By merging symbols and motifs of transformation, adornment, and the decorative from the natural world with human-made materials, Zhang explore a lineage of surface metamorphosis that moves between the organic and the fabricated and the metaphors of adaptability and resiliency that come with it.

Shellie Zhang is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto and New Haven. Zhang has exhibited at venues including Asian Art Initiative (Philadelphia) and the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego. n 2026, she received her MFA in Sculpture at the Yale School of Art.She is a recipient of grants such as the Toronto Arts Council’s Visual Projects grant, the Ontario Arts Council’s Visual Artists Creation Grant and the Canada Council’s Project Grant to Visual Artists. Zhang was an Artist-in-Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2017), received the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Artist Award (2021), and was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award (2025). Her work is in public collections such as the Robert McLaughlin Gallery and the McMaster Museum of Art. Her work has been published in Frieze, Canadian Art, the Toronto Star, Blackflash Magazine, CBC Arts, and C Magazine. Zhang is a founding board member of the Toronto Chinatown Land Trust.

The Artist would like to acknowledge the ongoing support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council. and Toronto Arts Council.