Zhao Gang: Diluted Retrospective

Each Modern is pleased to present Diluted Retrospective, an exhibition of new works by Zhao Gang comprised of two conceptual series; one of historical watercolors and paintings, and one of photographic works on paper and oil on silkscreen made in Harbin. The exhibition, deceptively titled a “retrospective,” reverses the retrospective exhibition into a conceptual presentation that traces the history of China as a country and Zhao Gang as an artist through new works. Presented on two different floors, the so-called “retrospective” looks back through history to reveal an identity that is connected through lost narratives, land, imagined territory, and ultimately crafted by Zhao. Zhao Gang’s artistic practice began when he was 18 with his participation in the Stars exhibition in Beijing, which kicked off his career. In 1983 Zhao left Beijing to study in Maastricht in the Netherlands, and would eventually relocate to New York City. As part of the “unofficial” art which emerged after the end of the “official” realism dominated practices of that period, Zhao’s early work maps a new Chinese cultural landscape that rejected old forms. In New York City in the 90’s, Zhao’s practice looked back towards Chinese antiquity. Houses and erotic sceneries found in historical Chinese paintings are rendered with harsh and direct brush strokes, stripping the forms of their historical context and revealing an interior identity of shape and color. After returning to Beijing in 2006, Zhao marked his semi-homecoming with a series on modern Chinese history and identity. Familiar faces from Chinese Revolutionary history are often found in Zhao’s artwork, frequently used as foils to himself. In this way, identity is presented through selfnegation. His approach to these subjects continued in his familiar style, though after returning to China his work took on a hybridized perspective which can be read differently in the Western or local Chinese contexts. The watercolor series in Diluted Retrospective is a narrative of change from within and without; “Movements,” figures, and forms come together in a lyrical presentation that remains tethered to the artist. The second series pushes off from this story perpendicularly, to Harbin, a city far off from our “center.” The watercolors and an oil painting make up the first floor of theexhibition. The series frames Russia’s October Revolution in a context that includes Chinese history and Zhao himself while addressing identity through links between China, communist revolutions, and also Contemporary Art history. In muted watercolors, Zhao renders Lucio Fontana’s “Spatial Conceptual. ‘Waiting,’” Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ mound of candy, a seated PuYi, the last emperor of China, and an infamous portrait of Grigori Rasputin. These disparate images intersect through Zhao’s practice. History and Contemporary Art become prisms through which we look back at the artist. Complementing this is the second floor Harbin, China series. A set of photographs with enlarged silk screen contact sheets depict the city that was once a refuge for generations of Jewish Russian immigrants fleeing the violent pogroms of the late 18th and early 19th century. Through Harbin, Zhao contemplates his own Manchu identity, the Manchurian migration out of Dongbei (Northeast China), and the role this outsider culture played in shaping modern China. Through out Chinese antiquity, the Manchu people were in conflict with the Han Chinese. The Jurchen Manchu’s of the Jin Dynasty invaded the Northern Song territories bordering their Dongbei homelands throughout the 12th century. In the 1600’s the Manchu’s would again invade China, conquering the Ming Dynasty and establishing the Qing Dynasty. But like the Jin before them, the Manchu Qing would assimilate and Sinicize. A liminal space between two lands and cultures, and the central node of the Russian-built Chinese Eastern Railroad, the imagined Harbin is captured in Zhao’s unique photographic artworks. It is a near-utopian space, historically tied to migration and dotted with movements, border-crossings, and stories of assimilations. Again, Zhao invites us to uncover a narrative as much tied to history as it is to himself. Both series represent a departure from the familiar modes of Zhao Gang’s art making, though they both orbit the concerns of his oeuvre; history addressed with levity, and identity externalized in the historical.