Assistant becomes master of his own style
Print Edition
LIVING in the shadow of a huge figure in China’s art world could have thwarted the ambitions of some artists, but Zhao Junzhong saw it as a precious experience.
For eight years Zhao was an assistant painter to Chen Yifei, one of the most renowned figures in Chinese contemporary art, until Chen’s sudden death in 2005, two days before his 59th birthday.
Since then, Zhao has sought to forge his own artistic path, with a solo exhibition featuring his latest canvases running at the Museum of Shanghai Oil Painting and Sculpture Institute this month.
However, his almost abstract style is very different to Chen’s classic oil paintings.
“But that doesn’t mean that I don’t admire the master,” Zhao stresses, “I still consider my days working in his studio as among my most precious experiences.”
Born in 1972 in Qingzhou, Shandong Province, Zhao graduated from the Shandong Academy of Fine Art in 1994. By chance he was introduced to Chen and in 1996 came to work in the older artist’s Shanghai studio on Taikang road.
Chen is famed for works ranging from brooding portraits of languid ladies of old Shanghai in traditional dress, to the natives and landscapes on Tibet.
A polymath, he also found success as a film director and style entrepreneur, working as a modeling agent and fashion designer.
“There were several assistants at the studio, and the team might paint about 80 percent of the tableau, leaving the remainder for Chen to complete,” Zhao recalls.
“If you ask whether I could paint like Chen, then my answer is yes. Eight years of painting at his studio had a strong influence on me.”
Zhao came to admire how Chen could brand his own identity on a work through the 20 percent he created.
He admits that were it not for Chen’s sudden death when shooting a film Zhao might still be following an assistant’s routine in Shanghai.
“Life is so uncertain! I had just received a call from him two days earlier, asking me to arrange something at the studio,” he recalls.
“When his driver called with the news and told me not to go to his studio that morning, I was dumbfounded. It seemed unbelievable.
“I couldn’t believe that he was gone, completely out of our lives.”
Due to disputes between Chen’s family members after the artist’s death, his studio was locked for a period.
“It was weeks later before I was able to take out my own stuff,” Zhao said.
Thinking back on Chen, Zhao highlights his generosity.
“My first car was given to me by him and he also financially supported for my apartment and my wedding.”
But Chen’s death meant a sudden change in Zhao’s career path. He felt that although he could make good money selling Chen-style paintings on the back of his association with the famed artist, he could never surpass the master and would constantly live in his shadow.
“I had to create something of my own on canvas,” he explains.
So Zhao walked away from Chen’s style and even the city of Shanghai. He furthered his studies at the Central National Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, trying to find his own artistic voice.
While, Chen’s work is renowned for its vivid mix of realism and romance, Zhao instead depicts a blurred world, sometimes veering into abstract, where the assurances of realistic oil painting give way to something more uncertain.
He seems to offer a distant, sometimes unsettling message in his paintings; whether a blurred landscape or a vaguely depicted girl dancing in dim light.
Now emerged from his mentor’s shadow, Zhao says that his own artistic journey of discovery still has a long way to go.
“I am still young, and I believe there are many possibilities in the future.”
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