Zhe Ren

Joe Zhe Ren is a multimedia artist, designer, and educator. He is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Design at California State University, Bakersfield, co-founder and chief designer of Expose Art Magazine, and a rotating vice-chair of the Executive Committee at the Association of Chinese Artists in American Academia (ACAAA). His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally across the United States, Sweden, Finland, South Korea, and China, and his research has been published in China, England, and the United States.

Artist Statement

My work explores the space between reality and representation—between what appears and what remains beyond immediate perception. I am interested in how images, narratives, and systems of meaning shape our experience of the world, and how beauty can both reveal and conceal the forces operating beneath the surface of everyday life.

I construct fictional environments—urban and natural—by bringing together disparate elements into new configurations. These worlds feel recognizable yet unsettled, existing somewhere between attraction and discomfort. Familiarity draws viewers in, while moments of contradiction invite closer attention. What first appears odd or improbable gradually settles into its own logic, leaving viewers uncertain where the familiar ends and the imagined begins.

Embedded within these constructed spaces are traces of alienation, greed, desire, and human arrogance—forces that quietly shape contemporary life. Miscommunication and fantasy are not merely symptoms of these conditions; they are among the ways reality is continually filtered, interpreted, and reshaped.

My work seeks to make that process visible by building tension directly into the image: between beauty and decay, harmony and disruption, coherence and fragmentation. What first appears familiar gradually begins to slip, revealing how fragile our sense of certainty can be.

Underlying this work is the Buddhist and Daoist concept of 相 (xiàng), often translated as appearance, form, or manifestation. Xiàng is the shape a thing takes as it becomes perceptible. It is neither illusion nor absolute truth, but a temporary expression of something that can never be fully contained by what is seen. Appearance reveals and conceals at the same time; it is how the world becomes visible to us, yet it can never contain the whole of what it shows.

I think of my images as forms of xiàng: surfaces assembled from fragments of media, consumption, memory, and desire. They invite viewers to remain with uncertainty and to recognize that what appears stable is often temporary, incomplete, and open to change.

A Zen saying describes three stages of understanding: first, a mountain is a mountain and a river is a river; then, a mountain is no longer a mountain and a river is no longer a river; finally, a mountain is again a mountain and a river is again a river. My work inhabits the space between the second and third stages—the moment when familiar forms begin to loosen and certainty gives way to a more complex way of seeing.

Working across digital print, animation, video, drawing, mixed reality, and virtual interaction, I appropriate and reassemble imagery from social media, news media, advertising, and abandoned landscapes to construct worlds that are at once familiar and strange. These environments blur distinctions between the real and the imagined, encouraging viewers to spend time with appearances that cannot be fully trusted.

Ultimately, my work is an inquiry into perception and representation. Through images that appear ordered yet remain unsettled, I seek to create moments in which the familiar becomes uncertain, opening a space to look more closely at the relationship between appearance, meaning, and the realities that exceed what can be seen.