California: Artist Zhen Wei has been selected for two juried exhibitions in Southern California, with one painting included in the Lancaster Museum of Art and History’s annual all-media exhibition and another presented in a Los Angeles group show examining layering in contemporary art.

Wei’s A Dash is included in the 41st Annual All-Media Juried Art Exhibition at MOAH:CEDAR in Lancaster. On view from June 6 through July 19, 2026, the annual exhibition brings together work across a broad range of media and reflects the museum’s continuing focus on artists working in the Antelope Valley and greater regional arts community. This year’s jury includes community muralists Carlo and Ethel Zafranco, known as AQMNI; Victor Gonzales, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Bakersfield Museum of Art; and Alison Ragguette, Professor of Art at California State University, San Bernardino and Interim Co-Director of the Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art.

Wei is an artist living between Xiamen and Los Angeles. She received her MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2023 and previously studied landscape and urban design in Taiwan, a background that provides context for her recurring attention to utility lines, framed skies, and partial urban views. Her painting Seven Wires was selected for Layers: Exploring Depth in Contemporary Art, presented by the San Fernando Valley Arts & Cultural Center at TAG Gallery in Los Angeles from June 17 through July 10, 2026. The exhibition considers layering as both a physical and conceptual device, encompassing built surfaces, repetition, transparency, obscuring, accumulation, memory, and narrative. The project includes an in-person presentation at TAG Gallery alongside a virtual exhibition on the SFVACC website.

The two selections place Wei’s recent paintings in distinct exhibition contexts.
MOAH:CEDAR’s annual juried exhibition surveys contemporary work across media, while Layers focuses more specifically on how artists use structure, buildup, and visual depth. Wei’s paintings approach these settings through a recurring group of motifs: clouds, changing light, utility lines, and partial views of the city.

In A Dash, Wei uses oil and cold wax on paper to construct an expanse of blue, orange, red, and yellow. A cloud-like form rises from the surface through the application of cold wax, which gives it relief without resolving it into a fully descriptive image. The painting remains open between representation and abstraction. It suggests an atmospheric view, yet avoids identifying a particular location or time of day.

Within MOAH:CEDAR’s all-media framework, A Dash presents a compact approach to landscape. Rather than offering a panoramic scene, the work isolates a small section of sky and makes its material construction visible. The cold wax does not simply describe the cloud; it introduces texture and physical depth into what might otherwise read as a distant image.

Seven Wires uses a more visibly ordered composition. A sun and thin clouds appear behind seven power lines that stretch horizontally across the paper. The lines divide the view into repeated bands, placing the open sky in direct relation to the infrastructure of the built environment. The city is not shown in full, but it is registered through the cables that organize the foreground.

That structure provides a direct point of connection with Layers. The power lines create literal layers across the image, while also determining how the viewer moves between foreground and distance. The work does not rely on deep perspective alone. Its sense of depth comes from interruption, repetition, and the contrast between a fading sky and the graphic force of the wires.

Both paintings extend subjects that appear across Wei’s Daylight Dream and Flight Mode series, including windows, clouds, light, utility lines, and cropped urban views. Across these works, ordinary visual fragments are treated as compositional material. Wei’s paintings narrow their attention to what can be seen from a window, across a street, or in a brief upward glance, allowing the structure of the image to emerge from partial observation.

Wei’s use of paper also supports this economy of scale. In A Dash, oil paint and cold wax create a surface that shifts between smooth color and raised relief. In Seven Wires, oil on paper keeps the lines direct and graphic, emphasizing their repeated division of the composition. The different material treatments give each work a distinct visual register while maintaining a shared interest in light, structure, and the city’s peripheral forms.

Across the two exhibitions, Wei’s paintings place sky, light, and urban infrastructure within the same visual field. In A Dash, the view is carried by color and the raised surface of cold wax; in Seven Wires, it is structured by the repeated lines of the electrical grid. The contrast between the two works points to a recurring concern in Wei’s practice: how ordinary city views are shaped by the materials, systems, and interruptions that organize everyday looking.