Feel of Air: the Concrete and the Abstract in Zhao Dajun’s Art

This exhibition presents a series of previously unknown drawings of the Hercules from various angles—side and back views—long thought lost and only recently rediscovered. They date from the same period as Zhao Dajun's well-known Hercules drawings (1978). Also on view for the first time is a 12-meter-long preparatory sketch he created in 1999–2000 for the large-scale historical panorama The Southwestern Shandong Campaign: The Storming of Yuncheng. By juxtaposing these little-known achievements within the social realist tradition with his final abstract canvases, the exhibition reveals the underlying continuity between Zhao Dajun's early groundbreaking explorations during his teaching years at the LuXun Academy of Fine Arts and the abstract works created late in his life.

Thread One: Blue and Yellow

The earliest extant example of Zhao Dajun's work is a gouache still life he painted as a classroom demonstration in 1962, shortly after graduating from the LuXun Academy of Fine Arts and remaining there to teach at its affiliated high school. White plaster geometric forms—typically used for academic drawing practice—became his subjects for color exploration. The angle he chose is deliberately provocative: the composition eschews perspective, containing not a single orthogonal line to suggest depth. A cube and a sphere stand side by side, facing the artist squarely, with no overlapping or spatial shifting whatsoever. The tops and bottoms of objects in the still life (a clay jar and the cube) align roughly with the viewer's eye level, as if looking into a two-dimensional world. Lighting the set from the left side, perpendicular to the view, further emphasizes this deliberate flatness. The painter's focus is evenly distributed; there is no hierarchical distinction between the objects, shadows, and background—only a concern with the transition between sharp and soft edges of different color shapes. Within a composition rigorously stripped of three-dimensionality and depth, this demonstration piece challenges the very possibility of representing an object's volume and spatial relationships through color alone. When Cézanne famously spoke of treating nature "by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone," his concern was not with the study of form per se, but precisely with what Zhao is doing here: the practice of pure modeling through color.

As a teacher, Zhao encountered high-quality reproductions of Delacroix's work at the old LuXun Academy of Fine Arts. Influenced by them, he consciously moved away from the warm "brown sauce tones" prevalent in academic painting at the time, turning from the expression of socialist sentiment toward a cooler palette imbued with more rationality and a modern temperament. This still life is suffused with a subjective tonality, drastically departing from the objects' local colors. Yet, unlike the Cubists or Fauves, we would not intuitively categorize it as abstract. Within the given tonal relationships and context, one can still perceive a nuanced rendering of the geometric forms' uniform whiteness. The highly transparent shadows on the background cloth suggest the drapery is also white, similar to the plaster forms. Blue and yellow—a pair of complementary colors—are deployed to articulate the lights and shadows on the white objects within the white environment; in other words, the tonal values. Approximately seventy percent of the picture surface is an interweaving of blue and yellow. Their mixture occurs directly on the painting surface, frozen in time by swift brushstrokes that retain their individual hues. Imagine a spinning disk: blue and yellow blend optically, in the manner of light or pixels, creating impressions of various grays and even white, while never being allowed to physically merge into

green. Blue and yellow interpenetrate and reflect each other, appearing both in the light and in the shadowed areas. Like the clay body and glaze of celadon porcelain, there is yellow within the blue, and blue within the yellow—a synthesized sensation beyond color definition. Warmth and coolness shift subtly in this mutual transformation of yellow and blue. Thus, space reveals and opens itself to us, allowing one to glimpse, as if in a trance, the particles and vibrations of light within the depths of transparent air.

Following blue and yellow come the earth red and purple, along with black and white, occupying the remaining thirty percent of the picture. The most highly saturated yellow appears at the mouth of the clay jar, as the highlight on its glaze; yet just beside it, on the jar's body, the highlight is a pale blue. The earth red used for the painting's date is the same pigment used for the clay jar. This life study, in fact, dismantles and reconstructs academic life painting itself. The dark brown produced by mixing earth red and blue serves as black, appearing in the background and in the intermittent delineation of various forms' edges. These combinations are the colors found in Cézanne's paintings, in Turner's, in the work of the Impressionists, of Picasso, of Der Blaue Reiter, and of Pop Art. When we view a white light source through a transparent colorless medium, as the transparency of the medium decreases, the white light presents a spectrum ranging from yellow to red. When we view a black shadow through a transparent colorless medium, and the medium itself is illuminated by light, as the transparency of the medium increases, the shadow presents a spectrum ranging from blue to violet. The simulation of these two subjective viewpoints mirrors the dioptrical phenomena behind the blue sky and the golden sunlight, created by the Earth's atmosphere acting as a colorless "lens" of variable transparency. Blue and yellow, as the two poles of light and shadow (white and black) contrast within the medium of air, represent the genetic code and visual syntax of modernism.

Thread Two: Closure

This rendering of a televised broadcast comes from Zhao Dajun's notebook. The event depicted is the second round of Group F at the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia: Germany's 2–1 victory over Sweden—a match in which the Germans, reduced to ten men, secured a last-minute win. At 94 minutes and 42 seconds of stoppage time, Toni Kroos, following a tactical one-two with Marco Reus, curled the ball into the net with his right foot for the decisive goal. The drawing style here can hardly conceal the author's childlike spirit. Its creative mission encompasses a passion for victory and defeat, an obsession with football tactics, and a desire to preserve a climactic moment—yet it is conspicuously devoid of artistic elaboration. I recall a memorable example from art academy textbooks: Chen Danqing's sketches made while watching television. The figures' movements are vivid and alive; the commentary beneath the images remarked that these forms seemed to burst forth from the page, still radiating warmth. Compared to such expressive, "high-resolution" drawing, the "stick figures" in this sketch have as their object victory and defeat—the game itself. A game relies on its own internal rules; it is a closed, self-contained system parallel to the outside world, indifferent to whether its representation appears vivid. This rendering is therefore de-literarized and de-thematicized: there is no added meaning, no display of technique, no engagement with systems of aesthetic value. Those who resonate with this drawing are die-hard football fans—people who, in turn, might feel nothing when looking at Chen Danqing's sketches. The stick figures are not anti-art; they are simply an ordinary, aesthetically indifferent non-art. Their significance lies in the compression, copying, and inscription of the event's core information—a pure representation for the sake of (the desire for) representation. It is low-resolution yet dense in information—and the same could be said of abstract painting from Cézanne through Cubism. This hardcore, research-oriented temperament runs throughout Zhao Dajun's creative career.

For Zhao Dajun, as for many artists of the modernist movement, closure is the necessary path to freedom.

Thread Three: Structure

Contour marks the differentiation of figure from ground, of inside from outside of the given form. Color, by contrast, is continuity in all directions—it disregards the figure, its disposition being primitive and indivisible. The Hercules series consists of drawings without contours: no beginning, no end, revealing themselves to us as an undifferentiated whole, clarity and ambiguity coexisting in equal measure. They are tonal values generated by the logic of color—drawing within the color dimension. When Zhao Dajun speaks of "structure," he means what Cézanne meant—structure refers to color. Color is an invisible structure. Structure has always been imagined as something solid, like architecture; yet in truth, everything cannot be seen or felt is structure.

In the 1970s, the British artist Harold Cohen, a pioneer of AI art, based his approach to creating AARON—a robot capable of autonomous drawing—on studies of children's drawing. He asked: "What is the minimal condition for marks to be recognized as an image? That is, marks to be seen other than itself?” Children's scribbles generally pass through three cognitive stages: continuous overlapping lines, stick figures, and closed contours. The earliest scribbling relies on continuous, repetitive mechanical motions that induce a kind of self-hypnosis. After this stage of pure marking, a vague structural framework begins to emerge—recognizable stick figures—yet figure-ground differentiation remains unclear, meaning remains ambiguous, requiring the viewer's imagination to actively fill in and complete. Ultimately, every child undergoes a crucial moment when scribbles are enclosed within contours: the closed shape produces an inside and an outside, the mark points to meaning beyond itself, figure and ground become clearly separated. This seems to correspond the logic of carving or building in sculpture—structure is the scribbling before the contour takes shape, it is the stick figure. Contour, in turn, is what is generated as structure is carved away or built up in space. Yet the entire framework and material substance of this sculpture—its mass—is color; contour does not exist.

Text: Zhou Yi