Bio

Zoe Feng is a New Zealand fine artist known for her incredibly realistic and vibrant oil paintings of flowers. Her artwork offers a skilled explosion of life and colour, evoking the riot of growth, delicacy, and resilience to be found in flower gardens.

Zoe has worked as full-time artist since the early 2000s, painting for exhibitions, on commission for hotels and restaurants and overseas clients, and completing a number of large murals. In New Zealand, her early work featured still life paintings of glass bottles.

When I was a child, I always love glassware, such as glass bead, necklace, and button. Each time I watched the light that show through the colourful glass and reflected into spontaneous pattern, it aroused my imagination endlessly… from fairy tales, Cinderella’s crystal shoes to lighting magic, and a wild fancy. I came to New Zealand 5 years ago. Collecting old glass bottles become one of my hobbies; they were all well made by hand, some of them over a hundred years. I was attracted by their simple forms, pure colours and full of mystery… each bottle is a unique creation and has its own unique story, and I tried to capture all these feelings and merged to my painted image… I wondered where it drifts from, what was inside the bottle originally. What would it's owner look like… might be "The old fisherman" (Hemingway)… or a beautiful rich lady… until today it hides somewhere under the ground, quietly laid on the beach and buried by sand day after day until someone picks it up.

Following four years studying graphic design at Chongqing University in China in the 80s, Zoe became an avid painter. She worked as a graphic designer for a magazine in Beijing and in the design department of a Chongqing television station, and painted in her spare time. She finally opened her own professional studio after completing an oil painting course at Sichuan Artists College in 2000. The College retained two of her oil paintings for permanent display. She moved to New Zealand in 2007 where she worked part-time in a flower shop and was inspired by the dual fragility and resilience she found in the flowers, delicate in beauty and yet able to survive journeys to different climates and plant roots in new soil.

Zoe was a featured artist at the 2002 Guangdong Artists Exhibition and a nude oil painting of hers appeared in the art book they subsequently published. She received a commendation for excellence at the 2003 Chongqing Art Teachers Exhibition. Zoe has held sell-out exhibitions at Art by the Sea since 2019, with clients often commissioning further work from her when all pieces have sold.