The artist often references the I Ching (or The Book of Changes), a classical Chinese text on divination and cosmology, and its graphic symbolism. This painting refers to the 45th of 64 hexagrams described in the text, named 萃, which means to collect or gather together, a sign of perseverance and progress.

Beginning with a somewhat anarchic approach, her self-made wooden stretcher frames are guided by intuition, taking on distinct shapes – slightly uncanny parallelograms that deviate from the rectangular norm. The frames then determine the images on the canvas, which balances the irregularity of their shapes. Materials like silk and wood selections such as mahogany, purple heart, and cherry serve not only as mediums but as metaphors for layers of memory and observation – silks as light, translucent, and evanescent as the wood is heavy and warm. Through her choice of the viewing distance and subject matter and by varying the transparency of paint embedded in silk canvas, Zheng takes control of the layers of legibility in her images. Influenced by Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, Zheng’s transparency recurs as a technical and conceptual motif, and it is through games of legibility, illegibility, and memory that she plays with the viewer’s perceptions of image and objecthood.