Zhong Biao

Zhong Biao’s vivid, colorful paintings represent the experience of living through China’s rapid evolution from isolationism to an urbanized modern state. He works primarily with acrylic on raw canvas, blending realistic figures with surrealistic objects and abstract gestures. Zhong derives the dreamlike quality of his work from the multitude of unsettling juxtapositions of old and new in contemporary China. In Welcome, part of his 2007 series “American Debut”, he depicts children in 1960s Cultural Revolution-era garb, Han Dynasty terracotta figurines, beauty pageant imagery, and English language banners. Widely considered one of China’s most significant and recognizable contemporary artists, Zhong captures the intense simultaneity of everyday experience, layering dozens of conflicting images and deploying negative space and blank swaths of the canvas to complicate their relationships to each other, spatial and otherwise.