photo by: Kathy Hanks

Hong Zhang was putting up the last of her work Wednesday, March 27, 2019, at the Fayman Gallery, 927 1/2 Massachusetts St. The show "Journey to the West: works on paper by three Chinese sisters" opens Friday, March 29.

Hong Zhang was dropping off the last of her paintings Wednesday morning for Friday’s opening of “Journey to the West: works on paper by three Chinese sisters.”

“Now I can sleep tonight,” said Hong Zhang, one of the three sisters displaying their work in the show at the Fayman Gallery, 927 1/2 Massachusetts St.

The other two sisters — Hong Zhang’s twin, Bo Zhang, who lives in Chicago, and older sister Ling Zhang, of Atlanta — would be flying to Kansas Wednesday evening.

The three were born and raised in an artistic family in Shenyang, China, and eventually immigrated to the U.S. They share a common bond of nature in their work, Hong Zhang said.

photo by: Contributed photo

The Zhang sisters, from left, Hong, Bo and Ling, are displaying their artwork at the Fayman Gallery in downtown Lawrence.

This will be the sixth time the Zhang sisters have shown their work together, but the first time in Lawrence.

For this exhibit, Hong Zhang’s pieces were created with a fine ink pen and Chinese watercolor on rice paper. They depict the seasons in the Flint Hills and Kansas tornadoes.

“I wanted to create the unpredictable tornado as artwork,” she said. Up close, her twisters looks like thousands of strands of moving hair.

Hong Zhang completed a degree in Chinese ink painting at the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1994. She then earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of California in Davis in 2004. She came to Lawrence with her husband, John Kennedy, who is an associate professor of political science at the University of Kansas.

Hong Zhang’s work has been displayed around the globe. She was one of seven Asian-American artists whose work appeared in a yearlong show at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

This will be the second time she has individually displayed her work in Lawrence. The first show was in 2012 at the Lawrence Arts Center.

All three sisters reference elements of nature in their work. Ling Zhang’s paintings focus on metal, wood, water, fire and earth, while Bo Zhang’s work features three-dimensional collages using tree bark and paper cuttings.