Zhao Zhao Solo Exhibition: White

The Tang Contemporary Art Centre will launch Zhao Zhao's solo exhibition "White" at Beijing's Second Space on May 20, 2020, with Cui Cancan as curator.

"White" is Zhao Zhao's first solo exhibition in 2020, and it is also a continuation of the "green" that is still exhibited at the Song Art Museum. Unlike the western trilogy of the past (Taklamakan, Desert Camel, Death), this new sequence and story begins with a change in color, it is no longer limited to regionality and immediacy, its vision and the problem of direction become more vast and majestic, and the time and space in the work are therefore long-lasting. If "green" is the prelude, "white" is the most important opening of Zhao Zhao's new initiative, just like the symbol of color itself, the first white light after chaos, the beginning of the purity of all things.

"White" has only one piece, one element. It leads from cotton to an earth-shaking history, and in the art form all the past and symbols fade away, until the meaning of white itself contains all and nothing.

White notes

Wen | Cui Cancan

(i)

As before, the story begins with cotton. In 2016, Zhao Zhao returned to Beijing from Taklamakan and began conceiving of an exhibition of this epic work, with one of the original ideas being to place cables on a cotton-covered floor. However, this display seems to be somewhat "wasteful" and "aggrieved", and out of his cherishing of cotton, Zhao Zhao abandoned this plan. From then on, he began to mull the idea of turning "cotton" into the full meaning, a magnificent, one-of-a-kind garden.

Where there is cotton, there is a corps. Zhao Zhao, who grew up in the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, has a special affection for cotton. From junior high school to high school, Zhao Zhao participated in six years of voluntary labor, and "picking cotton" became the only content and a task that must be completed. The meaning of "labor" and "fruit" is therefore distinctive in his growth. Nowadays, it seems that cotton is not only the land where he lived, the economic pillar of the production and construction corps, and the history of his father's generation fighting for life; it is also an indelible memory of Zhao Zhao's growth, a dull and tedious time, and a deep imprint left by painful labor.

It is also like the special position of cotton in the life course of Zhao Zhao, it is waiting to open a new relationship with Zhao Zhao. The Western Trilogy (Taklamakan Project, Desert Camel, Death), which began in 2016, allowed Zhao zhao to leave Beijing and return to the past, providing an opportunity for the relationship to retrace. Since then, cotton has become an index, a white container, constantly pushing Zhao Zhao's line of sight into the distance, towards a broader history and information.

"Cotton show in May, dried cotton in August, flowers bloom in the world, flowers fall in the cold", this poem by Ma Suchen tells the important position of cotton in the early Qing Dynasty society. Coincidentally, cotton has a well-known "prominent" story in human history. Originally, cotton was grown in Southeast Asia, East Africa and Central America, as a gift, it gave traditional civilizations self-sufficiency to flourish; until the emergence of the British, cotton products began to sweep throughout Europe, far and ancient East, became the "New World" of abundance in the eyes of Westerners. Where profits are, capital flows. The British East India Company began a massive trade in Indian cotton, which eventually evolved into a colonial war and India officially became a colony. After that, the European countries pursued the plundering of materials and the maximization of profits, and each of these ancient New Worlds "camped". Factories and plantations have formed a gold industry, and the control and plundering of raw materials have reduced costs the most. Labor, however, became the second conundrum until the advent of "slavery", when large numbers of Black African slaves were shipped to cotton plantations in the southern United States, becoming one of the bloodiest episodes of American racial history. Slavery, exploitation of indigenous peoples, imperial expansion, armed trade, these terms made machines and factories, and cotton also opened the prelude from war capitalism to industrial capitalism. Cotton not only gave birth to Western industrial civilization and capitalism, but also silently controlled the rise and fall of different countries and regions. The center of gravity of civilization and economy has since shifted, and "East" and "West", backwardness and advanced have also taken on a different meaning.

It was only a few hundred years ago, when cotton was planted in the South Indian Sea, that people did not realize that this crop, which had been cultivated for thousands of years, had a huge impact on the future life of mankind. The most important invention in the Industrial Revolution was the "Jenny Yarn Spinning Machine", the world's first factory was the cotton textile factory, and the modern working system was also born in the cotton textile industry. In daily life, soft, sweat-absorbing, warm cotton clothes are synonymous with comfortable homes. In the harsh winter, cotton became the most trustworthy clothing. On the futures exchange in New York, cotton is one of the commodities that traders care about the most.

Until 2000, China and India accounted for half of the world's cotton production, and the focus of global cotton planting and processing returned to the center of the cotton industry before 1780. When Zhao Zhao, who was still a teenager, picked in the endless cotton field, he did not know what kind of history the "flowers" in front of him were pregnant. It is not until many years later, when Zhao Zhao's identity and vision change, that this memory will be re-salvaged and processed, and its appearance, the understanding and intention it has been given, will become so different.

(ii)

In 2020, Zhao Zhao began to implement a brand new plan, which was brewed for many years to provide a creative structure for the audience. The cotton built in this structure is not only a soft, warm, and safe material feeling, which is closely related to his personal feelings; it is also a vast information related to labor, economy, and capital with different directions and attributes. Zhao Zhao gave the work a special name, "Chinese Garden", an "oriental garden" built in Beijing's 798 art district.

"Chinese Garden" is a collective name for Chinese gardens built in a foreign country. For example, Ming Xuan in New York Metropolis, Fang Hua Yuan in Munich, Yan Xiu Garden in Britain, Xi Hua Garden in Seattle, Yi Garden in Vancouver, etc., some of these gardens were built in the early 1900s, a period of plundering history has just ended, and the oriental atmosphere has swept Europe and the United States. Some were built after the 1980s as a new relationship in history, as a cultural "gift" between two countries or cities. Whatever the reason, "Chinese Garden" carries a history that has been reincarnated several times, which is a certain imagination of Chinese culture in the West, and it is also a "crown tomb" for Chinese people to pin their hopes and distant history.

"Distance" is another of the most important pieces of information in Chinese Garden, where Zhao Zhao piles cotton into 1.2-meter × 1.2-meter strips that form another meaning of "maze" in Chinese Garden. In the maze of cotton, all the distances and gaps are 1.2 meters, and all the relationships and structures are also 1.2 meters. 1.2 meters is the cardinality, which is a basis that can be stacked infinitely or decreasing. 1.2 meters is the interval between people and people in this white garden, the most commonly used safety distance in international practice, and 1.2 meters also symbolizes the ever-changing distance between East and West.

Zhao Zhao designed a public garden with a private and safe space for the audience, maintaining the best psychological and legal distance between people. The audience walks in it, repeating and strict order, equidistant and undifferentiated relationship, like a white mirror world, adding a little pure and mysterious emotion to this garden. Like at the beginning of the design, the Sanskrit-like labyrinth has some religious implications. In other words, this garden has built a miniature landscape for us about "distance", and "distance" has become its most important information point, the most core experience.

This "distance" is a discussion of relationships, which are both East and West, historical and political. Beginning with distance, human beings have developed civilization, aesthetics, and thinking. In the animal world, distance is the territory where animals live with each other, and when the distance between two animals is less than 1.2 meters, a fight is about to begin. And between human beings, distance constitutes a complex relationship between different people, cities, countries, societies, and institutions. From the tiniest units, the intimate contact between people and people, the comfortable distance between lovers and strangers; the spacing between cars and cars in the city, to the distance between two cities; the border between countries, the differences, comparisons, shocks between systems, etc. In society, all scientific and technological, cultural, and political developments are constantly shortening distances, eliminating obstacles, and finding the greatest universality and speed; in cities, all rules and orders are maintained through safe and effective distance control between individuals to maintain the high-speed operation of the collective.

Like gardening, cotton, distance, space, orderly passages, or some kind of "emptiness" all become part of design and control. The "Chinese Garden" was built in its homeland, in today's reality, in full accordance with Western logic, craftsmanship and philosophy. In this garden, traditional aesthetics and the legacy of the literati have long since disappeared. The white tape on the floor of the exhibition hall replaces the old moss and duckweed. Steel frames that can be quickly built, disassembled, and moved replace the columns, ring beams, and cornices of pavilions. The minimalism of the West and the aesthetics of industrial civilization have replaced the heart of the forest spring in the ancient artificial garden, and even the cotton, which never belonged to the "flower" in the garden, the "interest" in the eyes of Westerners, also bloomed everywhere in Zhao Zhao's Chinese garden.

Just white, full of white, once in the eyes of Song Huizong: "set the porcelain mang, discard it" color, has become the only tone of the whole garden. In Western civilization, white has a very different meaning, it may be political, radical, and terrifying, but it can also be pure, empty, and hidden. White has both and without, it is a general generalization.

However, this structurally completely "Westernized" Chinese garden also has some kind of oriental Zen machine. Zhao Zhao puts each viewer into a white "picture", and the moment they enter the garden, they have become a prop, a tree in the garden, or a bird. In this garden, you have me, I have you, and Cotton and the audience have achieved the new "Chinese Garden".

(iii)

"Chinese Garden" has a strong oriental flavor, and we can easily feel an identity of the other from this name, a Chinese culture in the eyes of Westerners who loved "Bruce Lee" and "Gongbao Chicken" after many colonial and trade revolutions, starting from the missionaries of the sixteenth century and after many colonial and trade revolutions. It is a symbol of ancient China and the far East, a product of the fusion of Eastern and Western cultures, but one is the bearer and the other is the oppressor.

Today, the concept of "Chinese Garden", created by Westerners, has added a layer of humor and irony to the title. The cotton that blooms in the garden is neither a product of the garden of the East nor a civilization spread by the People of the West. Safe distance, simple structure, and the story carried by the dazzling white make the reality of cotton point to become incomparably ambiguous and ambiguous. The past events of happiness and bloodshed, violence and money, prosperity and decay, like tidbits and dust, are all raised in this modern version of the Chinese garden.

Zhao Zhao sensitively captures and expresses all this, not only grasping this fleeting emotion of time and space, but also giving this emotion a greater historical framework and realistic direction. The Chinese garden, which has been aestheticized and romanticized, has long since disappeared. We are no longer as far away as the East India Company's detour around the Cape of Good Hope, and we no longer need to learn about the world from the pens of missionaries and wandering writers. In this garden, the imaginary imagination is long gone, the simple structure, the dense filling and the bales of cotton, labor, harvest, sin; purity, and money. This garden is no longer the allegorical world of the literati, the paradise of the world, it has long been a well-distanced, well-planned modern factory, a garden that seems to be only white, but contains red and black, sin and punishment, idiots and saviors.

From the ancient Chinese garden to the Chinese Garden, which is now located in Beijing, all this evolution is both a condensed human history and a perception itself, the duty of an artist to present it to the audience religiously. In the garden, everything is white, it symbolizes all, and it also symbolizes nothingness. It cut off the past and did not point elsewhere, and at the moment everything was silent as a mystery.

Or, it was just a distant memory of a teenager who belonged to Zhao Zhao's private possession.

(iv)

"Ting Shu doesn't know where people are going, and autumn and spring are still letting go of the old shihua." The only amorous carp in the pond is like a departed person protecting the fallen flowers." Only this kind of beautiful mood, the object is not human and the fragrance is easy to pass away, which is enough to describe the feelings that "Chinese Garden" brings to the audience.

Whatever information the work contains, it is only a hidden interpretation. Distant history will always be forgotten, the suffering of the past will always have another kind of redemption, and the stories of time and place will be consumed. But this form of proof of the spirit of the story will be eternal. When the audience continues to pour in, stop, and leave, all the history in time, all the deep meaning and the past symbolized by the old China, also recede.

In the midst of the white, we become a white landscape, as if we were watching a watercolor hanging on the wall. There are some eyes in the white world, and sometimes there are single shadows in the garden, sometimes groups of three or five, sometimes it seems bustling, and there is more noisy noise, as if this world comes and goes with duckweed and the past.

Such a situation of "not knowing the true face of Lushan Mountain, only being in this mountain" makes the impression appear more accurate than the story, and the perception is far more fascinating than the views and information. We can't generalize, much less in two words. "Chinese Garden" reminds me of a poem: "You look at the scenery on the bridge, the people who watch the scenery look at you upstairs, the bright moon decorates your window, you decorate other people's dreams." ”

Look, this is white, and although it is made by man, it seems to be open from heaven.