My Works
My Story:
Life takes us to unexpected paths from time to time. This axiom of life was certainly true for me in 2020. The year began with so much promise and prosperity, then the COVID-19 hit each corner of the world. After being a successful aviation professional for more than 20 years, I was laid off during the spring pandemic lockdown. Within days I was convinced this would be a very long road to recovery, I pondered a very remote chance of returning to GE Aviation.
It seems life has always brought me very significant challenges about every decade, particularly so for the last three ones. This is round 3. The round 2 was an exceptionally long journey of emotional and professional upheaval, recovery and rebuilding. After having finally depleted the entirety of my feelings of misery, I was determined “NO REFILL”. From that moment on, I decided to live my life with both joys and inner peace no matter WHAT disappointment I experience and WHAT roadblocks are ahead of me.
Five days after I was told being laid off, with helps and supports from my son and close friends, I went through multiple cascading stages of emotion: from the initial shock, disbelieve, distress, to apparently emotional detachment from GE. I was told, “Zhen, you have so many talents”, “If ANYONE comes out of this stronger, that would be YOU!”, “Zhen, what you lost is a job, NOT who you ARE!”. Writing those down today still brings me to tears. How blessed I have been to have such great people around me.
Having been trained in aerospace technology, and worked in the engineering field for most of my life (with both bachelor and master degrees in aviation engineering plus an MBA). It’s safe to say the left side of my brain has gotten more than its fair share of development. In light of this I began to contemplate the possibility of exploring the right side of my brain, to unleash the artistic creativity. Of course, that was a vague and remote desire, or as my friend said: “That is BOLD!”
To my surprise, there were unanticipated synergies and complementarities that were dormant and had eluded me. But they were nevertheless present. As it turns out, the engineering background comes in very handy with artistic expression. Afterall, our brains intertwine through the corpus colosseum from left to right, and they reciprocally enhance each other seamlessly. Those are just my personal observations, not academic claims. So please do not hold me accountable if I am wrong.
Growing up in China during Mao’s time, living through starvation, art was unattainable, ethereal, and more distant than Mars. Even the planets seemed more real, as they can be seen at night. There was NO art while I grew up, the whole country was colorless, black, white, grey, green and blue sky was my full color spectrum. Mao and other world leader portraits were my sole art exposure.
So, I started my artistic journey from ground-zero. The silver lining is that I don’t even have a box to think out of. I have boundless and untapped creativity, because, literally, the SKY is the limit.
I have been pouring my passion, energy, and heart into this new adventure. To me, art is like a perfect soul mate: responsive, compassionate, attentive, extreme in connection. It is transformative and liberating to channel the artistic energy, to connect and communicate through abstract media. Each painting carries a piece of my heart, soul and spirit, in return, each one replenishes me with new insights, emotions, contentment, tranquility, harmony… and refuels the cycle again.
I invite you to join me on this journey, to explore this intriguing, wonderful and marvelously mysterious world. I hope my art will bring you some joy, reflection, and inner peace.
Thanks wholeheartedly
Zhen
My Works
My Upbringing:
I was born in China during the three-year famine when the birth rate was very low due to a nationwide lack of nutrition. Compared with the rest of the country, I was lucky to be born on a state-owned farm, with rationed rice and milk. My parents told me later that as an infant in day-care, when I behaved well the whole day, I would be given a tiny bit of brown sugar on my palm that I would gleefully lick. That was my very first experience of savoring sweetness.
The “Culture revolution” permeated China and remains a powerful memory of my earliest years. Like so many innocent and mislabeled “incorrigibles,” my father was characterized as a “Counter-Revolutionist.” As such, our family belonged to one of the worst five “Black classes.” Because of my father’s political misfortune, kids threw rocks and spit at me, and otherwise sought to bully and humiliate me. I had ONE friend; her name is XiaoJie. To this day, I remember vividly, once while I was hiding under a bridge, avoiding kid-bullies, Xiaojie brought some cooked rice into her hands, and she put it on mine. I can still taste her rice at this moment…
I never saw Xiaojie after I left the farm at age 7. In my late 30s, one day, my father told me he found her. Father asked if I wanted to contact her, cautiously, I said I needed to think about it. The next day, I told my father that I had to resist the temptation of reuniting with her and explained my rationale: Like the sweet sugar I tasted as a toddler, Xiaojie was my very first taste of people’s kindness and friendship, too precious in my memory to be diluted by the risk of a bad experience in reuniting with her. I decided I couldn’t afford a profound disappointment, including the risk that she wouldn’t remember me as fondly as I remember her, or remember me at all.
My father started teaching me Chinese characters and poems since I was age 2. The only available teaching material was a few pages of newspaper consumed exclusively with Chairman Mao’s propaganda. In Chinese, Mao also sounds the same as “cat.” So, you can easily imagine, as a toddler, I would regularly point at the newspaper confusing Chairmen Mao with Chairman “cat”. Outside, there were ever-present Mao’s Red-Guards’ eavesdropping. If the Red-Guards perceived some alleged transgression, they broke in and took my father away, forcing him to carry a big sign demonstrating his “counter-revolutionary sin.” Those sad and turbulent times often resulted in my father being physically tortured because he called Mao a cat via his toddler daughter’s mouth.
I started helping my parents with chores at age 4. They later told me I was excellent at many tasks; some proclaimed to be even better than my mother did. At age 5, my mother and younger brother were forced to move 800 miles away to another city, leaving me with my father at the farm. They were allowed to see each other ONCE a year for a period of 30 days. Two years after my mother moved, at age 7, I rode on a bicycle for two hours with my father to a train station. Father put me on the train, waved goodbye (because he was forbidden to go with me).
That was my FIRST trip outside the farm, taking an 8-hour train ride alone. There were many army soldiers on the train as well. I remember the military doctor gave me some tiny Chinese medicine (called Ren Dan) when I experienced motion sickness on the train. I never remember having any anxiety or fear with my first solo trip, nor did I know or think about what came next. I was born fearless, and it’s in my DNA.
When the train stopped eight hours later, a woman unknown to me was there on the platform to pick me up. She announced that she was my mother. I don’t think I had seen my mother since I was age 5, so I didn’t remember her. The truth is I would have gone with just about anyone who was there if there was the promise of a meal. Back then, the entire nation was starving, NO one wanted other’s kids, so kidnapping was not a concern for any kind.
After reuniting with my “stranger” mother, we left the train station. While walking with my mother later that afternoon on a tranquil street, a man with a white wooden box on his bicycle walked by. My mother asked if I wanted anything. I had NO clue what she meant, so I shook my head no. BOY, do I regret to this day! It turned out he was an “Ice-cream” man, who sold artificial sugar ice cubes. My first taste of this delicious treat came a year later. A few days later, my mother pointed in a particular direction and told me to go there and attend my new school. Knowing nothing about schooling, I went there alone but was rejected. My mother then went with me and got me accepted.
My mother worked for a state-owned construction company, and we lived in one room with two other single-mother families. We each held a corner, one bed, and a small space for our belongings. The middle part of the room was designated as common area. If someone’s father came for the annual visit, that family would stay in a temporary place alone till the man left. There was no interior pluming, tap water, or a bathroom, which were located a few minutes away. The public restrooms were deplorable and horrific, and I still recall the “unforgettable” disgusting worms crawling everywhere. I still have nightmares to this day when I remember needing to go to the bathroom at night. Since we didn’t have any bathing area, we only had one bath before winter in a public bathhouse until the next spring.
We lived in that three-family room for about six years. Decades later, when I worked as aircraft engine sales director for GE Aviation, I chatted with a GE executive who grew up in a middle-east refugee camp. During the conversation and in reflecting afterward, I realized how similar our upbringings were.
Even though I literally grew up with nothing, I never felt poor. We were all in the same place, more or less, with different abilities and natural talents. I didn’t have the concept of wanting more than enough food in our stomachs. I had a radio a few years later, a big box, my best friend at the time. Actually, I was a happy girl most of the time, as long as I was not starving. Although I had nothing by objective standards, my strong sense of self-worth and ambition were undeterred by my lack of socioeconomic status or privilege. Instead, later in life, I dreamt and imagined a better life, propelled and catalyzed by my drive, perseverance, and a desire to excel. I dreamed of finding my place in the world. I never imagined that would be to excel at school in academics, work for prestigious global companies, and serve in critically important leadership and sales/customer support roles, be a proud mother of a wonderful son. Even less probably did I imagine I was gifted at artistic expression and would find peace, freedom, unbounded creativity in art, which would turn out to be my avocation and then profession.
The experiences of my childhood prepared me very well, facing life obstacles from time to time. Deep down, I know that no matter what happens, how difficult life may become, it will NOT be worse than my childhood unimaginable challenges. And even back then, I was NOT unhappy, as I was forever curious, passionate, and most importantly, grateful for small things that life has to offer. Sometimes, even today, when times are tough, I ask myself: “So, what is the big deal? What are you afraid of?”
Life is a journey that allows artistic expression to heal old wounds and to create immeasurable happiness in our wonderful world.
My Works
Zhen Rathbun is a Chinese-American Painter living in Cincinnati Ohio. Originally from Tianjin China, Zhen moved to Pawling New York in 2003 and between 2007-2011 taught Chinese Mandarin to high school students in FL, and received her U.S. citizenship in 2009. Zhen holds Bachelor/Master degrees in Aviation Engineering and a Master degree in International Business Administration.
Following a successful two decades long professional career in commercial aviation field, Zhen immediately began exploring art, using seamless and natural transition from left brain skills to the right.
Zhen paints with acrylics in the abstract style on both wood and canvas. Interestingly she does not paint with brushes but pours the paint onto her medium and uses the power of gravity to “flow” the paint in the lines, shapes, and colors that are inspired by her life experience and observations, and then becomes transformed through her feelings and emotions to take on a new form through her artistic expression.
Color in particular is very important to Zhen. Growing up in China during the time of Mao Tse-tung, diversity of color was uncommon to say the least, and instead life was a limited and dull palate of largely gray and green. Zhen’s work seeks to embrace the full spectrum of colors against texture forming techniques, against color contrasts that speak to the spectrum of human emotion and experience… love, joy, freedom, passion, laughter, struggle, sadness, and peace to name a few.
Zhen views her art as a reciprocity of gift giving, a very personal adventure for herself and codified on wood or canvass for those who can appreciate art that is capable of meeting them in the moment and become fresh and new with each new day and experience. Her art captures her spirit and the feeling of being fully alive and flowing as she does through her daily Tai Chi practice, and then finding channels of expression to help reach deeper understanding of oneself and live with confidence, courage, resilience and passion.
Life is not gray and muted in silence as it was for Zhen growing up; it is vibrant and full of color. In her artistic expression she frames a world where we can as individuals frame what that world should be. Life operates in seasons just as nature does, and so her art has no right side up, down, left or right but a recognition that each has purpose. It is a vehicle that has helped Zhen transcend many of her life’s most difficult challenges. Through her art she now offers others the opportunity to resonate along with her spirit and live fully and freely.
My Friends' Words:
Zhen exemplifies the spirit of the elite warrior... from my years in Naval special operations, I can say that she is a no nonsense, get the mission done operator...
Knowing her for the last 10 years I came to realize her tenacity and class... determined to succeed by embracing the motto of never quit and keep moving... with a background in engineering and experience in teaching she became a successful aircraft engine saleswoman with amazing results when she had the opportunity to work in this tough male dominated industry... a can do DNA, with a no mountain too high to climb nor challenge too difficult to conquer attitude... she continues to explore her amazing artistic talents, that I can say with confidence will celebrate her success to fame in no time...
Main Canaan- GE executive in middle East, former US Navy Officer
I have known Zhen for many years. I am proud to know she holds me in deep friendship, as I do her.
Zhen is beautiful inside & out. She has class and character of royalty, yet she is approachable and connected to the wonders of living a purposeful every day life.
I am most amazed at Zhen's resilience and never say die personality. She always sees hope and lives in the promise of a better tomorrow.
I am an avid fan of Zhen’s expression of her life experiences and the possibility of a better tomorrow through her artistry.
Zhen has a unique soul with very much to give to the rest of us.
Zhen is my heroine. Her presence in the world makes it a better place for all!
Lloyd David Ward
Thank you so much! It has been my great honor to have met you. I hope our communications continue through My Works