A Quest for Healing

Celebrating the gallery's 'year of firsts' the first of these solo museum exhibitions, A Quest for Healing: Zhang Yanzi will run from 27 April - 4 November at the Surgeons' Hall Museum in Edinburgh - one of the largest and oldest medical museums in Europe. 

Moved by her residency at the Museum in 2017, the show's gentle yet probing paintings and installations have been inspired by the rich collections of the museum. In particular, Secret Path, a series of four artworks which directly respond to western and eastern medicine, harness as reference, notes and medical illustrations from Notes in anatomy taken from lectures by Professor Turner, Session 1881-82 by David Middleton Greig (1864-1936) from the library of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. The multi-layered works consist of landscape ink paintings on the lower layer, and a human face painted on silk on the upper layer. The face is drawn from a Song Dynasty book serving as a resource on Chinese face reading methodologies; and how patterns of facial moles might divulge clues to a person's character or destiny.