Freud said about dreams: “They completely satisfy wishes excited during the day which remain unrealized. ” Through painting, artists become those who realize their dreams coming true, as they elucidate the inchoate environments in which they express themselves. In 2002 Jin-Hua Zhou graduated from the Oil Painting Department of the Sichuan College of Fine Arts, and enjoys repute among the leading painters of post 1970s era. Jin-Hua’s works have been exhibited in the US, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Hong Kong, and Beijing. In 2009 Germany’s Konstanz Museum of Fine Art planned a major Solo exhibition for his works, demonstrating the significance of this artist’s repertoire.

If the world of our dreams reflects illusions or ideals, then the world outside our dreams ought to convey reality or truth, and inner dreams and outer reality ought to blend as day and night, not as opposites, but as co-existent. However, it remains an impossible task for people to completely discriminate between the real and ethereal reification of reality, and it is more important that we develop a cognitive appreciation of the direction in which reality is moving, recognizing the dialectic, reversed modes of thought. His works display a kind of surrealist ambience, silently evoking an illusory sense, which confronts the “reality” within the works, revealing the Dreamy Reality of the exhibition theme. But it remains to be seen whether this absurdity is all merely a dream, or a dream-like reality. The newest works of Jin-Hua Zhou have further realized his sense of a growing realization of destiny and critical thoughts about his living environs.

He excels in using beveled photographic perspectives, to proportion human characters, resulting in the artist’s successful evocation of a clearly delineated landscape in visual perspective. The beveled perspective provides a holistic viewpoint, as if one enjoys a view of everything in progress right before their eyes. In Jin-Hua Zhou’s visual poetics, the material imagination of his untouched space, whether rural or urban, reflects the city as the focal point of contemporary lifestyles. Most of Jin-Hua Zhou’s works import more realistic backgrounds, with many reflecting a profoundly bold social commentary on events of the day. As he continues to invent indescribably absurd environs, he is able to communicate his sense of “Reality and Absurdity”, as yin and yang intermixed and unveiled, revealing his accomplishment of a Neo-surrealism appropriately reflecting the contemporary urban soul. A change in visual proportions often carries with it a change in one’s perspective, for example in the common lifestyle activity of “Folding the bedsheets”, seen from a new perspective, the sense is not only of order and chaos competing for attention, but also the imbalance and fear of adhering to the crowd and losing individuality. In these works, the layering of dreamscapes and reality, along with the unquenchable desire to unify the shards into a completely honest picture of reality, whether within or without our dreams, remains to be determined by the observer’s decision of direction.

Image: © Zhou Jin Hua, Nou Gallery