Imagine a storyboard painted onto a roll of silk celluloid. In Zhao Gang’s scenario, mythical creatures move across a horizontal landscape into the poetics of an inverted world. A headless human with a face drawn on its belly, arms gesticulating wildly, meets a reptilian mermaid, and a snake with several heads. Various flying and crawling fish share space with centaurs with lascivious smiles, sitting cross-legged, like actors waiting for their cue. The full-frontal perspective of his earlier paintings of women, or portraits of political figureheads, has given way to a wry revivalism of Chinese mythological characters. With Zhao the trickster, we enter a mischievous arena of buffoons and renegade heroes. Neither beast nor being, these liminal libertines play amateur dramatics with the sins of humanity in the 21st century.

Known for his bad boy attitude – and a devoted admirer of Martin Kippenberger - Zhao teases out the different roles of the artist in his approach to painting. He takes on the guise of a war reporter depicting battle scenes, or that of an academic painter who parodies the nude, or an itinerant artist who deconstructs traditions of landscape painting. With his latest set of inkworks on silk, he assumes the persona of the traditional Chinese storyteller. Yet rather than mediate age-old moral values etched into his memory since childhood, Zhao’s imagistic brushstroke perverts the virtues of this genre. Like the hybrid humanoids he depicts, his paintings defy “species narcissism”[1] and twist monocultural references. So that while one is tempted to read his works through the lens of ancient Chinese mythology, the resonance of European medieval bestiaries through to nineteenth century satire are equally prominent. From Honoré Daumier’s dream of an obese man with a giant pear on his stomach[2], to Edward Lear’s fish on stilts[3], or Lewis Carroll’s monster worm, the Jabberwock[4], Zhao uses the tropes of Nonsense to deflate political rhetoric and inject humour and relief into our current fears and anxieties.

Zhao Gang has a particular relationship to the painter’s stretcher. He recalls how in New York, in the 1980s, the exorbitant cost of these wooden frames would exceed the price of paint and canvas. With “China Stories”, he takes the stretcher and debunks it. Now left visible to the naked eye, it becomes a lightweight armature around which to roll the silk storyboard. The calligraphic figures hang gracefully from the ceiling as if drawn onto a banner, kite, or flag. Characters appear and then disappear in this filmic layering, their transparency catching the light and overlapping with a Janus-like effect that mirrors head with tail, and past with present. These new works, so poetic in gesture and humble in their execution, reveal the depths of Zhao’s painterly exploration of the legacies of imperial systems, politics, and heritage in both Asian and Western worlds.

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[1] Wole Soyinka, Beyond Aesthetics, 2020
[2] Honoré Daumier, The Nightmare, La Caricature, 23 February 1832
[3] Edward Lear, A Book of Nonsense, 1846
[4] Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky in Through the Looking Glass, 1871