Wenqing Zhai

Zhai Wenqing (b. 1998) currently lives and works in New York. She received her MFA in Painting from Yale University in 2026 and her BFA in Painting from Pennsylvania State University in 2021. She is the recipient of Yale’s 2026 Carol Schlosberg Memorial Award for Excellence in Painting and the 2025–26 Sanyu Scholarship.

Her work examines how beliefs are imperceptibly passed on and learned through everyday experience. She often draws on propaganda posters, sandplay figurines, and children’s book illustrations, borrowing these familiar visual languages of explanation, care, guidance, and instruction to observe how information is simplified and laundered across different media and through repeated iterations, gradually hardening into “facts.” Adopting the gentle, intimate, and seemingly innocuous register of these visual traditions, she uses allegory, humor, and narrative ambiguity to push her imagery toward a space that is absurd and unsettling. Instead of offering a fixed interpretation, she sees her work as a bridge or an open-ended dialogue, inviting viewers to project their own experiences and narratives onto it and to reconsider the relationships among story, meaning, perception, and belief.

Education

2026 MFA, Painting and Printmaking, Yale University

2021 BFA, Drawing and Painting, Pennsylvania State University

Solo Exhibition

2026 The Fabricated, Hive Becoming, Shanghai

Selected Group Exhibitions

2026 To-Gather, 32 Edgewood Gallery, New Haven, CT

Somehow Desire, Yale painting thesis exhibition, Green Hall Gallery, New Haven, CT

2025 Time Again, Green Hall Gallery, New Haven, CT

2024 Feedback Loop, Green Hall Gallery, New Haven, CT

The Armory Show 2024, Javits Center | Luce Gallery, New York, NY

2023 Untitled Source Youth, Wind H Art Center, Beijing, China

Well June, Moosey Art, Islington, London

Boundless Whispers, Eve Leibe Gallery, Artsy online exhibition

Awards / Nominations

2026 Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize for Excellence in Painting – Recipient

        Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship – Nominee

2025 Sanyu Scholarship – Recipient

2023 Hopper Prize 2023 Fall – Finalist

2023 Beyond Future Art Prize 2023 – Finalist

Publications

2026 “What Is the Next Generation of Artists Making? We Asked MFA Students to Open Their Studios,” Karly Quadros, CULTURED magazine

        “In the Present Tense,” Lily Waterton, Somehow Desire

2025 “Engineering Play: In Conversation with Wenqing Zhai,” Lara Xenia

2024 “Wenqing Zhai discusses evolving as an artist, exploring societal and political themes, & continuously pushing boundaries of expression,” Hopper Prize