Zhu Xiaozhu（朱笑竹）

Zhu Xiaozhu (b. 1982) was born in Suzhou, Jiangsu, and graduated from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. She currently serves as the Deputy Director of the Suzhou Brick Carving Museum. Having devoted many years to the study of traditional gongbi and ink painting, she has developed a profound understanding of classical pictorial aesthetics and, through the creative framework of “bringing scholar’s rocks into painting,” has formed a new ink vocabulary that balances antiquity with contemporary expression. Zhu takes traditional scholar’s rocks—such as Taihu stones, Ying stones, and Lingbi stones—as her primary subjects. Through delicate ink washes, textured rubbing, and intentional use of blank space, she constructs rock forms that possess both structural rhythm and a sense of breath. For her, the beauty of stones lies not in their surface appearance but in the cadence of their lines, the tension of their planes, the interplay of textures, and the mutual generation of solidity and void. In her work, the scholar’s rock is no longer a static object; it becomes a condensation of cosmic energy—an emblem of the Dao. This spiritual reading of stones continues the literati ideal of unifying poetry, calligraphy, painting, and seal carving, while also integrating elements of Western abstraction. The result is a unique visual language in which Eastern imagery and contemporary sensibilities coexist.