Oil on canvas

100.3 × 100.3 cm. 39 1/2 × 39 1/2 in.

PROVENANCE
Chambers Fine Art, New York
Acquired directly by previous American collector from the above
Private Collection, Asia

Scattered Star Lights and Duckweed on the Loose
Zhao Zhao's Free Soul

As a representative of Post 80s contemporary Chinese artists, Zhao Zhao was listed as one of the 25 most noteworthy artists in the world by Modern Painters in 2014, and his various artistic practice gained international attention. Since 2017, he has held solo exhibitions at the Song Art Museum in Beijing, Tang Contemporary Art Hong Kong, and participated in many international museum group exhibitions, including MoMA PS1 in New York, the Yokohama Triennial, and Pac Padiglione D'arte Contemporanea in Milan. His paintings were affirmed by Xinjiang Arts University when he was still a student. Being Ai Weiwei's assistant after graduated, he learned to “never accept superficial values, and always question why things are the way they are and not the other way around”. He has been working solo since 2011, but critical thinking has continued throughout his career. Untitled at this auction was completed in 2009. It's an extension of his installation 5113, which was executed in the same year and presented in Taikang Space, a titan of private collections in Beijing. In 5113, the author frames preserved rat feces, suggesting the dominance of industrial civilization over human life under the tide of the commercial age.

Falling Fireworks with Rain Drops

On the contrary to installation 5113, Untitled is an abstract painting composed of warm colors like yellow, orange, and red unevenly spread on the canvas to create a focal point. You can notice that the dashes look like rat feces in 5113. They seem so unreal, sugar-coated by colorful appearance, which makes people doubt what they see. It also challenges the definitions of beauty and ugliness, good and evil. It's classic Zhao Zhao, no matter how rebellious it seems. He deconstructs the abstract aesthetics with bold statements that defy authority and even fatalism: in the convergence and dispersion of colors, the multicolored dots are scattered in the sky like exploding fireworks, or floating duckweed, showing a colorful life trajectory.

Price estimate:
HKD: 120,000 – 220,000
USD: 15,500 – 28,400

Auction Result:
HKD: 236,000