Jiashun Zhou

Jiashun Zhou is a Chinese, Chicago-based fiber artist who weaves the parts of a house nobody stops to look at: the hallway, the doorframe, the stair landing. These are spaces built for passing through, not for lingering, and a floor loom is a strange, almost contrarian tool to point at them, since it can’t produce anything quickly. He builds rooms that don’t exist out of thread that takes months to lay down, modeled on no house he has ever actually lived in, woven slowly enough that the labor itself becomes a way of testing whether a remembered or imagined place can be made to hold weight.

A single item of Hallway 2 (2025) took months of threading before it existed at all. That gap — between how fast a corridor is meant to be crossed and how slowly it has to be built by hand — isn’t an ironic coincidence, but a valid, yet serendipitous, argument. You can see it directly in the weave itself: in Hallway, the vertical pillars marking each doorway are noticeably denser and more ropily textured than the flat color fields around them, as though Zhou’s hand slowed down at every threshold and sped back up in the open rooms between — and if that’s physically impossible within this process, that shift in pace takes place mentally.

The corridor is imagined — Zhou describes it as a house he’s “fantasized about at different stages of life,” rooted in the bamboo forests of his hometown but never actually built or lived in, which means the labor isn’t reconstructing a real memory so much as manufacturing one, thread by thread, until it’s sturdy enough to stand in for a place that never existed. That same logic shows up again in Totem (2026), where the same corridor gets compressed into a single narrow view boxed by a hard geometric border, more relic than room; and in Thaw 2 (2026), where the architecture gives out entirely into a fringe of loose, unwoven warp threads hanging off the bottom edge — the memory, and the material holding it together, visibly coming apart at the same rate.

Jiashun Zhou, Hallway, 2024-2025. Floor loom weaving — 110 x 40 in. Courtesy the artist © Jiashun Zhou

Jiashun Zhou, Thaw 2, 2026. Weaving by floor loom — 41 x 47 in. Courtesy the artist © Jiashun Zhou

Jiashun Zhou, Thaw, 2026. Weaving by floor loom — 41 x 50 in. Courtesy the artist © Jiashun Zhou

Jiashun Zhou, Stayin, 2026. Floor loom weaving — 90 x 40 in. Courtesy the artist © Jiashun Zhou

Jiashun Zhou, Good News, 2025. Weaving by floor loom — 40 x 58 in. Courtesy the artist © Jiashun Zhou

Jiashun Zhou, Totem, 2026. Weaving by floor loom — 41 x 65 in. Courtesy the artist © Jiashun Zhou

Jiashun Zhou, Hallway 2, 2026. Weaving by floor loom — 160 x 110 in. Courtesy the artist © Jiashun Zhou

Jiashun Zhou, Absence, 2025. Weaving by floor loom — 40 x 35 in. Courtesy the artist © Jiashun Zhou

Jiashun Zhou, History Puzzles (2024). Screen printing on canvas and cover on wood — 36 x 82 x 58 in. Courtesy the artist © Jiashun Zhou

 

 

Totem (2026) condenses the same architecture into a single upright image in which the corridor recedes to a small square of green and coral visible at the very center, glimpsed through a narrow passage of vertical brown and tan bands rendered in a tighter, more even weave. Thaw (2026) and Thaw 2 (2026) trade architecture for something closer to weather. The verticals loosen into horizontal bands and diagonal sweeps of rust, teal, salmon, and pale gold, woven in a looser, more open-gauge structure that lets the warp threads show through in places.

That negotiation is most fully worked out in Hallway (2024–2025), the piece that anchors the rest of the practice. It’s a multi-image weaving — five tapestries, each 110 by 40 inches, hung edge to edge so the corridor doesn’t sit flat against the wall but wraps around a corner, folding the viewer into it rather than presenting it as a picture to be looked at. It’s a work about return — about a space imagined so many times it has become more architecturally coherent than anywhere Zhou has actually lived — and the labor of weaving it, work after work, becomes a way of proving the fantasy can bear weight.

Jiashun Zhou (b. 1999, CN) holds an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2025) and a BFA in Fiber and Textile from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia (2023). His work has been shown at Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois Chicago, A2Z Advisory in Bahrain, and Ki Smith Gallery in New York — where his piece appeared in Fig Tree, developed in collaboration with musical artist Rozzi — alongside exhibitions at Zhou B Art Center, the Heritage Museum of Asian Art, the Springfield Art Association, the Bridgeport Art Center, Guilford Art Center, and Las Laguna Art Gallery. He has received a Highly Commended award from the Homiens Art Prize, an Honorable Mention from Blue Koi Gallery’s Interwoven: Patterns and Textures, and a 2nd Prize ribbon from Fiber Art Now, among other distinctions. His work has been featured in Fiber Art Now, Newcity Art, Al-Tiba9 Contemporary, Curatory Magazine, and Suboart Magazine. Zhou lives and works in Chicago.

For more information, please consult Jiashun Zhou’s website here →

Last Updated on July 16, 2026