Zhang Yongjiu was born in 1954 in Yidu, Hubei Province, and currently lives and works in Yichang, Hubei.

He is an interdisciplinary artist working across literature and painting, and a member of the China Writers Association.

Before turning to visual art, Zhang Yongjiu was deeply rooted in the literary world for decades. He has published more than thirty books—including historical essays, biographies, and prose—in both mainland China and Taiwan, and has been repeatedly invited as a cultural guest on Phoenix Television. This extensive literary background lends his visual practice a strong sense of narrative, metaphor, and intellectual depth.

At the age of sixty-five, a vivid and unforgettable dream led him to begin painting. The intensity and beauty of that dream compelled him to pick up a brush, starting with spontaneous marks on Xuan paper and gradually developing a sustained and disciplined artistic practice. In his early years of painting, he focused on realism through studio work and plein-air studies, while exploring a wide range of media including traditional gongbi painting, murals, Japanese ukiyo-e, watercolor, mineral pigments, oil pastels, acrylic, and oil painting.

As his practice evolved, Zhang began to question the necessity of pictorial likeness. Through extensive reading of both Eastern and Western art history, as well as reflections on the trajectory of contemporary art, he gradually clarified his own artistic direction—shifting from the representation of the external world toward the exploration of inner experience.

In recent years, his work has focused primarily on acrylic and oil painting, investigating the mechanisms of sensation, imagination, and dream imagery. His paintings are not reproductions of reality, but rather manifestations of psychological space—where beautiful, incomplete, and fragmented dreams coexist with unspoken emotions, memories, and subtle spiritual tremors.

For Zhang Yongjiu, painting is not a competition of technique, but an honest form of self-writing—

a way to paint the inner world, to paint dreams, and to illuminate the quiet secrets and fleeting glimmers that reside deep within the human psyche.