Artist Reflects on a Life Shaped by Cross-Cultural Journeys

Zhao Gang's solo exhibition, "The Bastard Gentry," at Lisson Gallery Shanghai is the first of a three-part project. The exhibition, curated by Yuan Jiawei, explores how a painter negotiates his own reflection after decades of transcultural travel.

The first act, titled "Shadow," reveals the 64-year-old artist at his most restrained. The seven large canvases – muted, deliberate, and steeped in ambiguity – turn the act of looking into a quiet inquiry.

Instead of showing faces, the artist depicts backs, leaving gestures suspended in mid-thought. Viewers are urged to stop before the scene, as if witnessing a repressed confession.

"He paints as if he were standing slightly apart from himself," Yuan said, "performing detachment until distance itself becomes a language."

Zhao studied in the Netherlands and New York in the early 1980s after leaving Beijing. By painting intermittently while working in finance, he developed a sensitivity to power, uncertainty, and identity shifts.

Since returning to Beijing in the mid-2000s, his work has moved between history and the personal, never settling into one language or allegiance.

In "Shadow," those decades of movement condense into stillness. Zhao's brushwork is light and fluid, his palette subdued: the pale blues of distance, the greys of dusk, and the faint warmth of human skin under fading light.

His landscapes open like thoughts half-remembered; his figures, anonymous yet intimate, seem to exist in the pause between departure and return.

He thus has built a practice that resists stability. His paintings oscillate between lyricism and irony, between the grandeur of Western Romanticism and the austerity of Socialist realism.

Yet beneath their composure lies unease, a flicker of the unresolved. His brushwork dissolves the boundaries of identity; his figures retreat, leaving only the echo of their presence.

If "Shadow" offers the painter's inward gaze, the second act, "Flesh," at ASE Foundation, extends the drama to the body. Here, Zhao becomes, in Yuan's words, "the butcher – dissecting not flesh but the myths of refinement."

Vast "meatscapes" turn desire into anatomy, beauty into a ritual of unveiling. It runs from November 9 to March 27, 2026, in a historic building on Maoming Road South.

The trilogy concludes with Debt, a conversation on November 12 at the Bund Art Center, where Zhao and scholar Lu Mingjun will reflect on art, responsibility, and the quiet economy of exchange that underlies every act of creation.

Act One: Shadow

Duration: November 12 - Spring 2026

Location: Lisson Gallery Shanghai

Address: 2/F, 27 Huqiu Rd

Admission: Free

Act Two: Flesh

Duration: November 9 - March 27, 2026

Location: ASE Foundation

Address: 7/Floor, 205 Maoming Road South

Act Three: Debt (Artist talk)

Time: 1:30 - 2:15pm, November 12

Location: Space 185 of the Bund Art Center

Address: 185 Sichuan Road Middle