East meets West in artist's view of cellphone culture

Traveling between the U.S. and China, Yuming Zhu often finds himself in airport lounges for long periods of time.

Being an artist, he watches people.

And he has noticed a phenomenon. People's faces were blank — until they used their cellphones.

Then there would be animation, emotion, character.

And he'd sketch away, eventually turning the sketches into paintings.

Busy people, laptops open, talking and connecting in a busy world.

Those paintings and others by Zhu are on display this month at the Solovei Gallery in Everett.

Elderly Mah-Jongg players in remote villages, with a cellphone on the table. A blond "Mona Lisa" chatting on a cellphone. A woman talking on a cellphone in a museum, surrounded by art treasures that she doesn't see.

"This is a phenomenon; this is life," Zhu said.

Gallery owner Lyussy Hyder says Zhu makes a point about "how the tools of communication and electronics [computers and cellphones] are actually disconnecting people."

She calls it an "illusion of connection."

"It's taking them away from the moment," she said. "It's going into a bit of a virtual reality instead of being in the present."

About 40 of Zhu's paintings will be in the show, a blend of East and West — long, flowing lines but also expressionist and fantasy elements. There are realistic paintings, impressionist paintings and music-inspired paintings.

The classically trained Zhu combines cultures.

He admires Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Degas, Klimt, Rembrandt and Edward Hopper, and his more Western paintings often have drafting elements.

"I like to have lines in my paintings," he said. "That's my training about the sumi Asian artwork. I love those lines, and I love the bright red in contrast with black. I feel like it's an emotional contrast."

He usually paints with music in the background, themes from "The Mission," "The Secret Garden" or Mozart. Cellos, violins and other string instruments work their way into his paintings: a bassist playing the blues or a beach-walker leaving violin footprints in the sand. The beach also is in the shape of a violin.

"I'll have nothing, just a blank canvas, and I listen to the music, and suddenly, the coordination of movement and color comes to me," Zhu said.

Born in 1962 in Shanghai, he studied both western and eastern literature and art at Shanghai Teachers University. During the cultural revolution, when Mao displaced rural and urban populations, "My mother was sent to build roads," Zhu said. "She was a teacher. It was almost like sending her to Siberia." Now his mother lives in Bellevue with his sister, a calligrapher.

Zhu came to the U.S. in 1988, a year before the Tiananmen Square protests, to attend graduate school in California. He studied art therapy and clinical psychology at Sonoma State University in California, earning a degree in clinical counseling.

He came to Seattle to work at the Asian Counseling and Referral Service, eventually becoming a U.S. citizen. Now living in Woodinville with his wife and two children, he owns a Chinese art-supplies import business and does cultural-exchange trips under Paragon International Arts, as well as teaching art in college continuing-education programs. He also has been an interpreter and licensed mental-health counselor.

For nearly a decade, Zhu ran the art-therapy program at Compass Health in Everett, and organized an annual art show of works by clients and staff that drew high acclaim for its transformations of young people with mental-health disorders. This month, Zhu was honored with a state award as an "exemplary service provider" by the Washington Mental Health Planning and Advisory Council.

"Sometimes I feel the clash," he said of the art divide between East and West. "The way of looking at things is different. My Western style teaches me that everything you look at is realistic. You're painting a landscape, you have a vanishing point, you sit there, you don't move. But Asian philosophy totally throws that out.

"You're part of the object you are painting. So it's blending. You're working along inside the scenery. You're part of it."

Diane Wright: 425-745-7815 or dwright@seattletimes.com