"Black allows me to get to what is essential."
- YZ
Born in Beijing in 2015 with the portrait of Empress Wu Zetian, the only woman to rule China under her own name, the Empress series has since unfolded around the world through residencies, exhibitions, and institutional invitations. In 2023, YZ opens a new chapter with Empress Celte, inspired by her immersion in Brittany and the creation of Keyll Forêt Jardin, an autonomous laboratory space she co-founded cantered on druidic knowledge, basketry, forestry, and natural medicine.
The Celtic Empresses pay tribute to the sacred trees of the Celtic calendar — oak, elder, holly, hazel — and to the women who embody their symbolic energies: insight, healing, strength, and protection. The forest becomes a gallery, the faces become memory, and the women become messengers.
Yseult Digan, alias “YZ”, born in 1975, is a Franco-British artist. Her work has been presented in major institutions like the Centre Pompidou in Paris or the ArtScience Museum in Singapore. In 2017, she was selected to give a new face to Marianne - the national personification of the French Republic - as she appears on postage stamps, a reinterpretation which she named “Marianne l’Engagée.”
After having lived and worked for several years in Senegal and Ivory Coast, she now resides in France.
