Zhong Biao

Simultaneity of Existence: Zhong Biao Excavates for Meaning


By Britta Erickson

"In the vast world, there are plenty of opportunities to fulfill one's potential." So reads the banner emblazoned across Zhong Biao's recent painting, What a Great Country: You Can Do Anything. Beneath the banner a teeming crowd masses behind the head and shoulders of a supine young woman who gazes out at the viewer. The hustle and bustle of the crowd contrasts with the woman's contemplative expression, suggesting that while we may be fully aware only of our own dreams, or the dreams of those close to us, everyone moves through life in pursuit of certain goals, making for a hive of simultaneous but disconnected activity. For some, aspirations may soar high: above the crowd an airliner turns to cross the mountain ridge acting as a backdrop to the scene.

The notion of disconnected activities and objects occupying the same space and time is central to Zhong Biao's oeuvre. Forging tight-knit compositions from the jarringly disparate, he creates a new kind of surrealism that encourages a reevaluation of our understanding of the role and experience of the individual. While his message is universal, the imagery reflects the artist's position as a man who came of age during China's evolution from isolated communist state to global economic powerhouse, and who now has carved out a position among China's youthful urban elite.

Having progressed economically at lightning speed throughout the later 1980s and the 1990s, China now embraces a crazy mix - of economic practices, living situations, cultural influences, and so on. Futuristic metropolises such as Shanghai stand not far from farming villages where the manual drudgery of peasant life continues with little change. Donkey carts bring produce into Beijing. The desperate poverty of migrant workers clashes with city-dwellers' conspicuous consumption of imported luxury-brand items. Among the jarring juxtapositions of old and new, rich and poor, foreign and Chinese, can be found gems of absurdity, and arresting incongruities. This special situation cannot last forever, but for the moment it makes for a richly varied environment.

Zhong Biao has developed a special appreciation of China's incongruous juxtapositions, arriving at it from the point of view of someone whose life has enfolded as China has unfolded. Shortly before graduating in 1991 from the Oil Painting Department of the prestigious Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou (now called the China Academy of Art), he visited Xi'an, a city of major importance in Chinese history since the 11th century BCE. (Xi'an is best known as site of Qin Shi Huang's 3rd century BCE mausoleum containing the Terracotta Army.) Fascinated by the remnants of the past, he determined to find a way to bring past and present together in his art. His early works addressing this problem convey two sets of ideas: first, beneath the surface of present-day life lies the past; and second, vestiges of the past will emerge in the present. Passersby of the City I (1991), for example, shows a young woman stepping out from a wall where the wallpaper has peeled away. While the lower half of her body has fully entered the present, the top half is rendered as an ancient wall painting in a millennia-old style, yet wearing contemporary clothing. Compositionally, the figure is deemphasized: she becomes merely another object within the painting's frame, albeit the most fascinating. This enhances the work's surreal quality.

By the time he painted Singing while Walking (1996), Zhong Biao had expanded his interest to include the co-existence of China and the West, featuring such emblems of the West as Coca-Cola, McDonald's, and English language signage. Although at this point the philosophical underpinnings of his oeuvre were not yet fully developed, this painting displays many hallmark features of his later works, including a more complex arrangement of objects laden with symbolic value; the frequently appearing dominant motif of a young woman frozen mid-action; and the contrasting rendering of some areas in black and white, and others in vivid color. Zhong Biao sometimes chooses to render figures in shades of gray, to reflect the fact that people experience only a temporary existence in this world, eventually belonging to the past.

According to Zhong Biao, in 1998 he realized that for him to do the work of bringing together past and present in his paintings was entirely unnecessary, for they already coexist in contemporary life. For example, when we eat a meal, the food has just been prepared from fresh ingredients, but the wine will be aged, the dishes may be antique, and perhaps the furniture is hundreds of years old. Although each thing was produced at a different time, they perform a function in the present. His interest then turned to the question of "why are these things together now?" The reasons may not be so obvious. The present is the result of everything that has gone before, but what of the future? Zhong Biao expressed his thoughts on this matter in the triptych he painted for the 2006 Shanghai Biennial, 1913 AD, 2006 AD, and 2148 AD (2006). The seed of everything that is to come lies in the present. Thus, any moment encapsulates all that has passed, and all that is to come.

As a philosophical notion, the presence of infinity within a point has vast implications, and this concept has been expressed in one form or another in disparate times and cultures, ranging from religious notions of interconnectedness to the Big Bang theory. But the physical evidence of the confluence of times and places has never been greater than in the present, when rapid international travel has become commonplace, and the Internet provides instant communication of vast quantities of information, visual, textual, and audio.

Zhong Biao works by assembling images from photographs to create provocative and arresting compositions. Although he prefers that his works not be over-explained - he wants the viewer to think for him/herself - it is helpful to have the source of imagery described for a few works. Welcome, for example, is dominated by a Han dynasty burial figurine collected by the artist: it makes an appearance in many of his paintings. The two children standing behind the figurine are excerpted from an old photograph, probably Cultural Revolution era (1966-1976) or slightly earlier. Contemporary buildings and sky, tufted spearheads, and the "Welcome" banner complete the composition which thus brings together the present and the recent past, dominated by the distant past. The Offering, by contrast, foregrounds the present, splicing together a photograph of a woman (taken while she sat on a stool) with a scene of people stopping at the giant incense burner that stands in front of the main hall of Puji Temple (established 916) at the Buddhist site of Mount Putuo, which Zhong Biao visited in 2006. Although the woman seems to bear the past on her back, it does not appear to be a burden; rather, it seems to draw her upwards towards the light. Further and Further does not refer to early history, but the layering of figures suspended in space suggests the passage of time, even in the present.

Zhong Biao's approach to the his focal concern of simultaneity of existence has become increasingly sophisticated, beginning with an appreciation of the relationship between the past, the present, and the future - including the changing significance of historical objects as they move through time - and progressing to an understanding of the coexistence of diverse individual psyches, disconnected and yet interrelated. We should not let the lush young women and bright arresting colors of his recent works distract us from an appreciation of the images' philosophical underpinnings. In fact, such a combination of easy superficial attractiveness overlaying a search for spiritual meaning vividly reflects the lives of many members of China's urban intellectual elite who, having achieved a comfortable metropolitan lifestyle, now seek for deeper meaning.

Dr. Britta Erickson is an independent scholar and curator whose work focuses on contemporary Chinese art. Current projects include co-curating the 2007 Chengdu Biennial, and editing a special issue of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art focusing on the contemporary Chinese art market, subject of her 2006 Fulbright research in China. She is the primary author of China Onward, to be published Spring 2007; previous major publications are Word Play: Contemporary Art by Xu Bing and On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West.