Brash rebel artist an 'eternal provocateur'

Zhao Gang is often referred to as one of the only members of his generation who truly understands both Eastern and Western cultures.

The Chinese-American artist spent his formative years engaging with Western modernism and its aftermath before returning to China with a re-established persona as an artist.

"Zhao Gang's life trajectory is a continuous quest for new and different possibilities," said Phil Tinari, director of the Ullens Center of Contemporary Art (UCCA), in Beijing, which hosts Zhao Gang: The Road to Serfdom, an exhibition of the artist's recent work, until May 31.

"He became the early emigrant who got out to Euro-America and has arrived at a personal resolution to the dialectics of displacement and encounter that characterized so many lives of that period."

Tinari described Zhao as an eternal provocateur, saying the artist's brashness is partly owing to his celebrated rebellious streak, as shown in his gift of pithy and wounding invective and his razor-sharp honesty about himself and his situation.

That is also mirrored in his art.

After visiting the villages of several prominent scientists and intellectuals involved in the May Fourth Movement, an anti-imperialist movement that stemmed from student demonstrations in 1919, Zhao created a massive group portrait with vistas culled from the Yangtze River Delta, while juxtaposing his personal research trip with the trajectory of this group in an ostentatious beige Porsche Carrera.

"It was really out of curiosity about their lives," Zhao said. "In some way, I was wondering if I were one of them."

Tinari, a curator of the UCCA exhibition, said the artist is a contemporary analogue to the intellectuals and artists who form the subject matter of the work. Like Zhao, many of them were educated abroad in top European and United States universities and returned to China at the top of their game.

"Shown together, these works break down the persistent dicho-tomy of portrait and landscape in an extended meditation on unlucky fates," Tinari said. "In the landscapes and interiors, where red and black, those two colors of workaday brushwork and imperial edict, become tonal keys, a sense of almost didactic perspective emerges."

Zhao said he has long faced anxiety over his identity, adding that it was "the only thing that concerned me" after his research trip.

"When I was living in New York, I had less of an identity crisis than I do now in China," he explained. "Because I know I'm a minority in the US and I'm fine with it. But in China, everyone is trying to be Westerners, adopting Western ideology and seeing Western standards as the ultimate. It is a problem that people don't have their own standard."

Tinari said the intellectuals, whom Zhao sees as alternately heroic and heroically stupid, are ciphers through which Zhao is able to address his own unlikely predicament.

Born in 1961, Zhao studied art in Europe and then in the US in the 1980s. He received a master's of fine art from New York's Bard College in 1999 before getting married and having children during his lengthy sojourn in the US.

Christian Viveros-Faune, a New York art critic and curator, described Zhao as a "precociously independent thinker".

This is highlighted by the fact that, at aged 16, Zhao dropped out of Central Academy of Fine Arts and joined China's first avant-garde art collective, The Stars, finding early inspiration in glimpses of catalogs of Western impressionist paintings.

In the 1990s, while other Chinese artists were struggling to integrate into the Western gallery system, he decided to give up painting - he was reluctant to be a commercial artist - and tried his hand at different jobs, including working for an investment bank on Wall Street for seven years.

"I never do what I don't want. Seeking a reputation makes no sense," said Zhao, who started at the bank as a translator and then became a banker. "The important lesson I learned on Wall Street was discipline."

Since returning to his calling as a painter in 1999, he has maintained a rigid routine, painting every day from 7 am until it gets dark.

"I feel pleasantly excited when facing challenges and pressures. I enjoy the process of solving problems," he said. "I'm keen to make plans and stick to them tightly. As all things move forward and reach their goals, I get an amazingly strong sense of relief and contentment."

On the day of the opening reception for The Road to Serfdom, the artist, in a blue cowboy jacket and jeans, admitted he was tired. In addition to the ongoing UCCA exhibition, he has been preparing for another solo show in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, starting on April 10.

Zhao has another passion: long-distance motorcycling, which he said is a form of physical and mental training to maintain balance and logical analysis in times of pressure.

"It helps me to hone and increase my willpower, as a small error can lead to a crash," he said.

But the existentialist rebel of the early 1980s is a vastly different man from the worldly painter who returned to Beijing in 2007. "I have become tender and milder as I get older," he said.

He said he hates mediocrity and hopes to become one of the world's most prominent artists.

"I'm sorry to see that many young people lack a clear sense of self-identity and purpose, and I feel lucky I have one that I love," Zhao added. "Diligence will reward the chance of success."

lijing2009@chinadaily.com.cn