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鈥業 don鈥檛 paint sunshine and air ... but chaos, darkness鈥
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ZHAO Zhenrong paints sprawling urban infernos, dying and ruined manmade landscapes swept by acid rain.
His works have the feel of a modern environmental doomsday and apocalypse, and Zhao admits he’s a pessimist.
“But I don’t want to repeat what’s already in front of my eyes,” says the Shanghai native who now works in Guangzhou.
“The world I paint is not one of sunshine and air. The world I know is filled with tension and disturbance,” he says.
That’s an understatement.
Zhao’s canvases, usually more than a meter wide, are unsettling, intense, abstract, dark and vibrant. The air is often filled with strange objects, blobs, fish and weird calligraphy.
Sometimes he outlines a lonely figure, a face or a silhouette in a corner and adds words related or not, such as “Good-bye! Shanghai” and “Passionate Flames Burning the Buildings.”
Some critics say that Zhao’s canvases evoke those of German painter Anselm Kiefer.
In fact, Zhao tries to liberate himself from the existing knowledge system of art history. He deconstructs figurative scenes through an expressionist method.
He often starts from photographs, web photos or scenes from blockbusters about urban destruction or the end of the world.
In early 2010, he started to create his “Goodbye! Shanghai” series with movie screen-like proportions an angles.
“Even though I know this city since I was born here, what I can perceive and sense now is nothing but darkness, chaos and strangeness.”
Last year, some critics called Zhao a rising star after his solo exhibition at Today Art Museum in Beijing.
Art critic Xie Kejun says, “Zhao is both constructing and also deconstructing through these veiled scenes. It seems he is trying to cure his world with the repeated covering of oil and colors.”
Zhao observes, “In my eyes, the real world will eventually disappear, and we will become animals dwelling in a virtual, made-up world. ... This era will be labeled an indifferent, apathetic epoch. When we are in this hustling and bustling existential world, we can only see an endless barren land.”
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Born in Shanghai in 1971
Graduated from the China Academy of Art in 1998
Earned master鎶 degree in 2005 from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing
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