About

Shellie Zhang (b. 1991, Beijing, China) is an artist based in Toronto and New Haven. Working across a range of media, Zhang explores how legacies of translation, migration, and memory leave traces and impressions across bodies, materials, and images. Her work examines processes of integration and assimilation, asking how culture is learned, negotiated, sustained, and transformed through lived experience. She is interested in how symbols and iconographies shift across generations, carrying histories that are inherited, transformed, and reimagined over time. Drawing on motifs of transformation and adornment from both the natural and constructed world, she investigates surfaces as perceptual thresholds that register the imprints of metamorphosis and adaptation.

Zhang has exhibited at venues including Asian Art Initiative (Philadelphia) and the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego. In 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.