“Contrasting dualities” is an oft-seen quality in Zhang's work, which often evinces maturity and calm that bely the artist’s years. The language and spiritual undertones of her work interweave the characteristics of art from various epochs, engendering a tension that leaps into the viewer’s eye. Zhang is adept at using minimal lines and contours, yet her work often flouts the conventions of contemporary art, aiming to explore ways of underpinning contemporary forms within a classical sense of order.Of course, it is difficult to reconcile modern and classical understandings of line and contour. Contemporary abstraction encourages the use of brushstrokes and lines that highlight -- the purpose of their existence in a painting is that of visual manifestation itself. Whereas in the long history of classicism, this was not always the case. In classical art, lines and contour signify order -- just as Greek philosophers declared the universal elements of beauty to be order, and Augustine extolled the “imitation of a unified underlying order” as the highest aspiration of earthly life. In the wave of modernism that followed classicism, order collapsed and unity was fragmented -- as in Dostoevsky’s “polyphonic novels,” wherein the only internal order is expressed as a “fragmented whole.” In Bach’s compositions, one finds another source of such aesthetics, where order is fragmented into scattered forms, and through polyphonic melodies one discovers a form of non-uniform harmony.Zhang Peiyun’s work is informed by Augustine’s classical order and enlighted by Bach’s polyphonic structure. Extending from classic characteristics of “internal order” to modern “internal, but unified” expression, her work arrives at last at the contemporary, which is “neither internal or unified.” Bolstered by the evolution of varied implications of line and contour in painting, Zhang’s seemingly minimal work is imbued with a rich complexity. In her artistic practice, she does not limit herself to a single intellectual position. To her, each period’s sense of order in and of itself constitutes a different type of knowledge, while the perception of any sense of order must be based ultimately in love. Zhang believes what is truly important in art is not the rationality of order. Rather, it is how the artist intuitively expresses order and how the audience perceives that sense of order, which has been relegated to the realm of rationality. And thus, the premise of her show’s name becomes clear.

显而易见，对于线条与轮廓的认知，向来存在古今之争。当代抽象法则鼓励着凸显笔触与线条，直观地显现自身就是它们在绘画中存在的目的本身。然而，在漫长的古典时代，情况却并非如此。线条与轮廓的意义在于，它们是秩序感的表征。诚如古希腊哲学中的“美存在于秩序”，而虔诚的奥古斯丁更是把“模仿内在统一的秩序”奉为尘世生活的最高价值。在紧随其后的现代主义文化浪潮之中，秩序感从其内部崩裂，不再以统一面目示人。最为典型的例证，即是陀思妥耶夫斯基的“复调小说”，其中的内在秩序仅仅被表现为“破碎的完整体”。在这种美学范式的源头巴赫那里，秩序感被裁切为散点的形式，内在于多声部的旋律秩序之中，演绎出某种非统一的和谐。章佩芸的绘画创作受到奥古斯丁古典秩序和巴赫复调结构的启迪。从古典的“内在统一”的表征，再到现代的“内在却不统一”的表现，最后是当代的“既非内在亦不统一”的显现，线条与轮廓在绘画演化过程中诞生的不同意义，为章佩芸看似内容极简的绘画赋予了丰富性。在创作中，她并不拘泥于其中任何一种知识型的单一立场。在她看来，不同时代的秩序感本身构成的是不同类型的知识，而对任何秩序感的感知必然是基于爱。绘画中真正重要的东西，并非秩序感所代表的理性，而是艺术家和观众如何感性地表达与感受着那种被归类为理性的秩序感。这也正是她把个人项目被命名为“爱与知”的原因所在。