About

Zhao Gang’s new body of work is contorted with personal and social-political contexts. These paintings’ subject matter is a continuation of previously explored themes—the purge of intellectuals and the emotional wounds that scarred their period of history. The potted plants and fruit trees of these paintings were, at the time, seen as symbols of bourgeois thinking, due to the arbitrary connections drawn between the plants and the intellectuals’ minds. In turn, these plants came to represent illicit thoughts in defiance of the communists’ ideological purification. Gang grew up during that …