Quotes of the Day

Artist Yi Zhou's latest sculpture has all the trappings of a Cold War – era secret, so she's appropriately mum about the details of its creation. What she will say is that it took help from NASA scientists to shape her medium, a translucent substance called aerogel, into a likeness of a human heart. For the Shanghai-born artist, the absorbent material — used aboard NASA's Stardust probe to trap dust from comet tails — represented a new artistic frontier. Cajoling some from the space agency took years. "I had to show them I was serious," she says.

Work by the hotly touted 29-year-old sculptor and filmmaker appears this month at the Guangzhou Triennial and from Oct. 30 in a solo exhibition at Hong Kong's Ooi Botos Gallery. The Hong Kong show's centerpiece is a six-minute short depicting French actress Charlotte Gainsbourg wading slowly into the sea in a black evening gown.

The exhibitions mark Zhou's first foray into her homeland's feverish art scene. Demand for contemporary Chinese art has exploded in the past few years, but her personal feelings are mixed. "Some of the work is good; some of it I don't feel as close to," she says. Perhaps that's a product of her international upbringing. She spent her early childhood in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou before moving with her parents to Rome and taking art lessons after school. At university in London and Paris, she studied political science, but drifted back to the art world after graduation. Her first films were seconds-long Macromedia Flash videos.

These days, she lives in Paris and shuttles often to Hong Kong, producing work that typically melds classical European influences with a minimalist aesthetic. But despite the impression given by her Italian accent — and works like a series of animated shorts inspired by the chapters of Dante's Divine Comedy — she considers herself "completely a Chinese artist."

It will be hard to top the aerogel heart, but Zhou has a few exciting projects lined up, including a short film featuring Charlie's Angels actress Lucy Liu ("It's her first time working with an artist," Zhou says with some pride) and a fountain that she's making out of a Ferrari. Presumably the car was easier to come by than a supply of space-age goo.

• Megha Rajagopalan