It was during this time as a performer when she quickly learned that she is a born storyteller, though she would later realize that entertainment was not her end-all be-all. She shares, “The experience of performing on stage planted a seed in my heart of wanting to touch people with my own expression.”

Drawing from her search for a sense of belonging, which is an extension of her dual identity as both Chinese and American, Zhou directs the scene for the viewer to feel that same inherent loneliness, though it seems like there might be an end in sight—marked by the fact that there is another being just on the other side.

In her series, when the East of the day meets the West of the night, Zhou removes people altogether. “The two cameras, like the gaze of protagonists, capture this continuous, slow lateral movement across the horizons as the sun sets and rises from two sides of the Pacific Ocean (China and the United States),” she explains. “Rather than an outsider perspective, this is a first-person point-of-view. That shift has a lot to do with my experience in this country.” While she is still looking out to the horizon, the imagery reads close and intimate because it is directly related to her current physical position. She is still the one on a side but the other beings opposite her are her family and friends in China.

Along with using gestural and behavioral elements to speak to the themes in her work, Zhou finds herself using architecture and landscape as part of the narrative, saying, “Growing up in Beijing, where some of the most modern structures were built around the 2008 Olympic Games, I became more aware of the impact of architecture on a place, as well as the accelerated rhythm of the urban environment.” It’s a curiosity that grounds the viewer with her. She adds, “These transformations led me to see the transience of urban spaces: how familiar places can be suddenly made unfamiliar. I try to capture these ephemeral intersections of lives and stories in my work.”

Her natural curiosity of landscapes and locations led to her award-winning work Project Unity: Ten Miles of Track in One Day. Along with the historical and cultural contexts, the installation draws attention to the Chinese emigrants who built the transcontinental railroad in 1869. Zhou worked with sculptor Hwa-Jeen Na who designed a partially built circle with panels on which Zhou’s video scrolls across miles following the railroad track. Zhou remarks, “I knew right away that I wanted to incorporate a continuous, moving landscape to connect the fragmented pillars. Conceptually, I wanted to do something that would resonate with the Chinese community in America.”

Fueled by the anti-Asian sentiments exacerbated by the pandemic, Zhou recalls, “It didn’t take me long to come upon the history of Chinese transcontinental railroad workers, and I decided to memorialize their identities, thanks to the work of Professor Gordon Chang and his team at the Chinese Railroad Workers in North American Project at Stanford University.” Calling back to the idea that Zhou closely examines people’s behaviors and what that examination conveys about the human condition, Zhou brings to light the workers' names, commemorating them. The project reminds the audience that discrimination against Asian communities is not something novel, rather it has existed all this time and we must finally face that truth.

On the other side of criticism, Zhou’s work meditates on her identity of being a Chinese woman living in America. “My work is meditative,” she says. “It’s rooted in Chinese philosophy, which seeks to find peace beneath the turbulence of daily life. Second, my aesthetics are influenced by traditional scroll paintings, which always illustrate a compressed narrative, multiple events happening at the same time.”

Zhou desires to enjoy the space she takes up between here and there, physically divided by a body of water, a familiar insignia that pops up in her work. “Someone mentioned that they noticed I used water a lot in my work. In when the East of the day meets the West of the night, the water of the Pacific Ocean is a literal, physical barrier between myself and China, my hometown, and my family. At the same time, I know that my family is on the other side. I can’t see them but I know they are out there. The ocean is separating us but also links us together. There is something really powerful and romantic about that, about looking out over the water’s edge in that way.”

Zhou goes on to say that this quality also exists in Love Letters, a project she filmed that features two dancers standing on the east and west banks of the Chicago River, sending messages to one another from afar using gestures. Similarly, Zhou shares, “For the past two winters of the pandemic, while waiting to go back to China to film the second installment (Moon) of when the East of the day meets the West of the night, I filmed myself alone tracing two moon patterns by dragging a suitcase during snowstorms in Chicago, as if to create mantras suspended in a time of waiting.” The use of water does apply here but instead of waves crashing, the water stands frozen, longing to thaw.

In so many ways, Zhou’s work is a playback of her life, a continuous film, curated and installed with the intention of leaving authorial interpretations to the viewer. It is an open-ended approach to interacting with universal themes that speak to the immigrant experience of reaching for community in a different home. It is her direct response to undeserved hatred for her cultural identity. Most notably, the gestalt of Zhou’s work lies within the notion that distance isn’t just a physical barrier. It can be the emotional and mental limitations we hold against each other, as well.

Zhou’s work poses the question: If these limitations were lifted, what would be waiting on the other side for us? Whatever it might be — a sense of community, family, friends, truth, love, home — Zhou’s work insists that it’s worth waiting for and watching it unfold.