Recording is at the crux of Zhao Liang’s work. People often only notice the cold, cruel reality through his lens, but very little attention is given to the kind of ascetic mental qualities, which are also qualities projected by his creative approach. The ‘movement’ and ‘stillness’ of reality, and the ‘meditative’ and ‘agitated’ mental spaces, together constitute four dimensions of Zhao Liang’s work. Through unbounded possibilities of reducing reality to interrogating individual mental worlds, this artistic position distinguishes Zhao Liang’s work from the terrain of discourse covered by more-ordinary interventionist practices. This exhibition will be presenting the video work Bored Youth (2000) with mounted photographs in traditional Chinese painting to reveal distinctive contrasts and resonances. Together, from our tireless acts of recording and intervening, there is a deficiency in questions raised by the art context directed towards the foundation of formal creativity – Zhao Liang’s work proposes a method of opening up mental spaces with a kind of tragic meaning.

*image (left)
courtesy of the artist and Three Shadows +3 Gallery