Wenzhi Zhang’s family of pottery works, which encompasses its visitor in its rough and brutally massive nature at first approach, speaks powerfully a quiet solemnity. Walking through a sea of painted pottery works, you can just imagine that you are caressed in the arms of nature and can breathe in the fragrance of the soil, touch the texture of the earth and feel the warmth of Mother Earth. At the same time you just lose the arrogance and the strong desire to conquer, but you get the power to survive with nature. Wenzhi’s rough, simple, wild and mysterious pottery art triggers off our attachment to the primitive humanistic culture. 
Early human life is the dawn brought by the Goddess upon the human civilization. Such fairy tales as “Nuwa makes human beings with yellow soil” and “Nuwa mends the Sky by smelting the colored stone” represent the reverence of our forefathers for the human creator. Just as Wenzhi puts it, “a man comes from the nature and will return to the earth sooner or later.” Pottery and mankind have formed a natural affinity and developed a closer life rapport.
How come that Wenzhi’s Pottery Art can arouse a strong attachment to the primitive humanistic culture? It lies in that her pottery art reverberates with a sense of confidence, self-improvement spirit of the feminism which seems to be the cultural core of the primitive female ancestors. With the arrival of the masculine society, the Goddess falls into a slave.  Females give way to males by shifting their position from the dominator in life to the weak to be readily trampled upon by males, thus the aesthetic standard of the feminine beauty changes with the elapse of the times. The primitive and rough simple beauty to the decorative good looking and strongly advocated in the Han and Tang Dynasties and then to the helpless morbid beauty in the Ming and Qing Dynasties. It follows the traditional standard for the feminine artistic aesthetics and has taken shape with the gradual historical changes of the feminine beauty, namely the basic principle of “Feminine Beauty”. Wenzhi’s pottery art calls for the return of feminine artistic quality, roughly heroic and spiritually energetic, which, no doubt, represents a rebellion against traditional aesthetics. 
Wenzhi’s pottery art is her life form and the external representation of her life spirit. She gives vent to her ideas, thoughts and reflections by means of the pottery art. People find it rather difficult to understand why there is the image of a porcupine with spines sticking out on its black back in the collection of her art works and why she could give such a philosophical reputation as “Porcupine Theory” to the series of clumsy porcupine with sharp spines. If you had a better understanding of Wenzhi in her years of postgraduate education, when she fully demonstrated her defiant spirit and the hard-edged frankness in her daily life and studies, coupled with the setbacks she had from time to time, you can easily know how the image of the porcupine is closely combined with her mental state then. With the gradual accumulation of her life experience, her pottery art totally transforms itself from the expression of the individual life condition to the care and concern of mankind by incorporating the small self into the great self, integrating the individual life with nature and “merging all works of God into an organic whole.” Her works like “Soul of the Forest,” “Messengers of God,” and “Life- An Ocean,” raise people’s life awareness to experience life freedom, happiness and poetic expression as well as the endless, imposing and magic universe, so that we take it upon ourselves to embrace the world. Transcending ourselves with infinite love and incorporate ourselves into the endless universe to create the poetic beauty of nature and sublimate the individual life. Her works like “Weeping Birds” and “Oxygen of New Space” demonstrate her worries about the filthy air against the deteriorating survival environment as a strong reminder for residents of the global village to protect the blue sky over our heads. Her “Inhabitation” series models upon a small house. From its panes, all kinds of faint lights emanate, which gives us a sense of warmth and mystery. They seem to convey the strong expectation of Wenzhi, and a sorrowful awareness of the potential dangers on the part of the general public just as described by Du Fu in his famous line “every person has the house to live happily.” The profound significance lies in bliss to the helpless souls against the backdrop of the modern civilization. “People enjoy the poetic inhabitation” represents the great expectation and the spiritual conversion of the modern people. Wenzhi’s pottery vase entitled “Chinese Nationality” models upon the folk tradition and stands more than two meters tall. People often see such an elegant decorative work at the gate or gallery of auditoriums or hotels, but hers is a large assembly not within the category of the luxurious, they just stand Majesticly on the earth like undulating mountains. Many patterns symbolizing life carved onto the surface of the pottery vase convey the mysterious and noble spiritual appeal as delicately conveyed by ancient Totem poles. “Soul of the Forest” is a sister of “Chinese Nationality,” two large and soaring columns, but the latter is kind of a cylinder, square-shaped, as they reproduce the ecological system of the natural bushes in relief form. Its top is seemingly like the head of a bird, explicitly implying that it guards the forest. So in the collection of Wenzhi’s painted pottery works, we don’t see them as ice-cold and lifeless objects, on the contrary, they have the “poetic” connotations and represent an affectionately emotional life. Martin Heidegger remarked, "All Art is Essentially Poetry." Wenzhi’s Pottery Art has transcended the scope of the practical potteryware but they are just like music, poems, or the gurgling springs, artistically recording her life conditions 
and her mental course, so her painted pottery works have spiritual significance. 
Wenzhi’s pottery works do not care too much about delicateness and elegance, but they  highlight the aesthetic quality of the ecological roughness and simplicity. Her pottery works do not follow the regularity and accuracy in art forms, but mostly in the chaotic imaginary form. It seems that they are represented in the form of randomness setting the artistic format, taking irregular shapes, dented or slanted somewhere but sticking out somewhere else, setting off brightly against the naturally flowing glaze, bringing about the various images of much fun and interest, coupled with the unpolished ecological roughness and simplicity. Thus, giving you a kind of intuitive vitality and the impulse of the free life. These features can be found in the lot of life pottery works she has created for tea houses recently. Her works are highly featured with ambiguity as the modeling language tends towards abstract symbolism. 
Take “Weeping Birds” for instance, it gives us a certain feeling with the non-specific imaginary language; it can be birds weeping at the sky by stretching their neck or rhythms composed of musical notes. Now let’s take a look at “Wine Community,” it models upon some tube combination. But is it a group of pleasant melodies or does it symbolize some good-for-noth among our society? The ambiguity makes her works full of connotations. 
Wenzhi, who got started by learning sculptures, strongly aspires after the massively pure aesthetic quality in her pottery creation. Her pottery works are simple and possess the massiveness of sculpture. More attention is paid to the visual tension of the art forms, highlighting the charm of the pottery works. The pottery works are created with various styles and forms with the sculptural concept and by    
combining all different ceramic materials, glazes and the firing control in the course of the pottery production. Actually, her pottery works are highly featured with the unsophisticated nature of the ancient Chinese stone-carving in the Han Dynasty, demonstrating the Modern Moore dexterity, yet they are pottery works rather than sculptures. Some say, she is a female pottery maker. However, she tries hard to knead the earth with both hands with blood dripping, pinch the greenware into shape, glaze the works and have the greenware fired in the kiln. Most importantly, she integrates the inspiration and emotion of a female artist into her pottery, highlighting the modern cultural characteristics of her work. 
Wenzhi is an artist particularly sensitive to materials with a peculiar interest to bring different materials into full use. For quite some time in the past she picked up f=iber art, and created textile sculptures (also called “installation art”). Perhaps it is the natural creative weaving instinct bestowed by God upon females, and also the female traditional domestic skills demonstrated in the saying “men toil on the farm while women spin at home.” After society ushers in the division of labor in the civilized society. Wenzhi’s creative thinking and dexterous hands facilitate the creation of the works. She has tried her hand at modeling by delicately weaving textile fibers into pottery, such as, “Soft and Stiff,” integrating linen with wood, “Kun,” integrating bamboo with palm fiber, “Simplicity,” integrating calamus with wormwood and “Weeping Birds” wrapped up with root of collect iris. Ancient people had handles on either side of the pottery pitcher with the rope for easy use. Yet she boldly used textile fibers in the pottery works purely for the aesthetic need or from the prospective of philosophical thinking. There are two ornaments, somewhat like an oxhorn, or the male penis in “Life- An Ocean,” interwoven with two red and white fiber ropes, extending as long as you can imagine, so you may ask whether it symbolizes all things in the universe, life and the nature, all of which are highly integrated, reflecting the philosophy of Unity of Opposites. What’s more, she tried to patch up the notch in the pottery works with fabric rope, so the aesthetic feeling with deformities is inherently an aesthetic taste, yet the mended pottery jars look just fine, leaving the damages unsatisfactorily amendable. Wenzhi used the soft and stiff wood materials to highlight the contradiction of the strong against the weak, arousing new aesthetic feeling and philosophical thinking. Undoubtedly, she has broadened her valuable attempt in the aesthetic field of pottery art.
Furthermore, she has created paintings, mural paintings and drawings and also tried her hand at other forms of art. She wrote a book titled as “Modern Materials Art”. Wenzhi has absorbed abundant nutrition from the extensive art ocean, and broke through the boundary between the craftsman and the artist and also the boundary between the sculpture and the pottery. In the post-modern art of the post-industrial era where the outlook on art is counter culture, counter aesthetics and anti-art; it is difficult for us to imagine where her art will turn, but her versatile imagination will prevail. Wenzhi has unhesitatingly come to the forefront in the history with the loss of discourse power for females in the past several thousand years and has made the unremitting efforts to break through the dominant position strongly held by the male culture. With the advent of the new century, the wheel of the history establishes the new order and new standard while breaking through the stereotyped patterns and standards, offering the opportunity for males and females on an equal footing in the actual terms. Wenzhi is a warrior marching fearlessly onward on the male and female platform in the new chapter of the human cultural history. Phoenix retains the eternal life against the fire and Wenzhi has sublimated her personality spirit in the art purgatory.