Zhang Zhaoying's solo exhibition, Lifelong Picture, is set to open at L-Art Gallery (Shenzhen).

This exhibition continues the artist's "Lifelong" series. Using the concept of "Yinghua" (cinematic pictures) as a central thread, it delves into the complex relationship between images, history, and contemporary visual experience.

The exhibition opens on November 9th at 3:30 PM and will be on view until January 15, 2026. We look forward to welcoming you!

Lifelong Picture:

Images of Desire, Historical Collage, and Theater of Heterotopia

By Gan Ting

Introduction: The Prelude to the Deicide of Images

“Where is the giant Goliath now?” cried the young shepherd David, clad in resplendent pink, standing tall amidst the surrounding Philistines. He vowed that he had slain lions and bears, and those who mocked the God of Zion would perish like lions and bears that day! With a bent knee and a reverse grip, his sling was aimed at the bronze-armored giant Goliath within range. The cloth strap tensed, the moment was critical. It was a moment full of temptation, a prototypical moment of historical victory or negation. Thus, Goliath’s head was replaced by that of Karl Marx. In this narrative long scroll from the Renaissance period, which revisits the biblical story, amidst the classical grandeur of golden hinges and glowing rivers, typical images from the early rise of capitalist consumer society—vintage cars from 1960s and 70s films and advertisements, and middle-class men and women in swimwear—slid into the bottom of the scroll. They participated in and witnessed the slaying of Marx, the challenger of modern capitalism, along with the decapitation of the grand theory and critical spirit he symbolized.

When we grasp the logical implications and inspirations of Zhang Zhaoying’s image games in his work Warrior—The Pledge, we understand that his meticulous investigation, appropriation, collage, and theatrically arranged images are not merely attempts at an aesthetic and method of absurd theater achievable in painting. More importantly, he is consciously recording and constructing a contemporary reality—the implosion of images, the dissolution of meaning in media, and the flattening of history from depth and complexity into fragmented images and symbols. History, once a continuous process full of cause and effect, suffering, struggle, and meaning, is reduced to a dimension of juxtaposed moments and surfaces. Beyond this, he further employs this complicit strategy to create vast, profound heterogeneous spaces within the picture—an accessible theater of heterotopia. With various incompatible bizarrerie, he thrusts the contemporary frenzied visual structure into our faces, marking with innocence and ambition the lingering of history in reality through play, in an effort to bridge the transmission of history as he perceives it.

The Society of the Spectacle: Images of Desire and Historical Collage

The "Lifelong" series, suggesting a certain continuity, has now reached the "Picture" segment. It relates, first, to the cinematic elements in Zhang Zhaoying’s new works; secondly, "project/reflection" (映) and "image/paint" (画) function as both nouns and verbs, summarizing Zhang’s methodology: reflecting the visual madness of this era, confronting the society of the spectacle, where only an excess of images can reveal its related mysteries; and using postmodern collage to signify that all historical moments have become flat fragments, yet still striving to reflect and refer to reality amidst the loss of history and the eternal present.

It is easy to feel before Zhang Zhaoying’s works that this is a canvas representing the pinnacle of today’s world’s visual experience—no blank spaces, no breathing pores, only dense and saturated symbols surging—masterpieces of classical painting, historical portraits, film stills, consumerist totems… a myriad of elements, stocked and ready, while real life has been replaced by this vast representation. When Zhang echoes Guy Debord’s "society of the spectacle" with his imagery, he comprehends and presents its core mechanism: the capture, guidance, and stimulation of human desire by excessive image symbols. In Pan's Feast, Jan Brueghel the Younger’s The Sense of Taste serves as the appropriated background, depicting abundant food and banquet scenes—a pre-modern tableau of desire, which leads to physiological needs directly related to survival and pleasure. More modern foods—hamburgers, pasta, cocktails—are superimposed and collaged into the picture, and once again, cars, beauties in swimsuits, and middle-class men and women at play appear—the entire symbolic system of modern consumerism, here directly turning life’s demands into excessive desire. More significantly, the head of the goddess Venus, whom the instinct- and lust-symbolizing Pan attempts to seduce, is replaced by the head of a Western man from a 1960s or 70s movie poster. Has love and desire in modern society also become displaced and lost in the consumption of images of sex and beauty?

Fredric Jameson, in his theory on postmodern culture, mentioned the "disappearance of a sense of history"—in the flood of images of capitalist consumer society, history is no longer remembered as deep narrative or experience but is transformed into images, symbols, and sensory surfaces. In a series of fragmented extraction, appropriation, collage, replication, and dissemination, form is simulated, while essence and meaning are revoked. In his stacked yet flattened visual theater, Zhang Zhaoying precisely creates a spectacle where historical consciousness has collapsed, and the depth of history can no longer be traced. However, Zhang himself is not a complete postmodernist; his appropriation and parody are not of a zero-degree tendency. Yet, it cannot be said that he possesses the passion of modernist critique either. He simply has a strong individual awareness within a reality that is also a historical process, eager to respond and refer to reality and history. As he himself said: The problems of history and today are still manifesting, I need to pass on the message.

The presentation of Constantine the Great in the exhibition’s Oriental Tales series is a precise message about the reality of contemporary capitalism. One of the appropriated original works in this series depicts a pseudo-historical event: Constantine the Great kneeling before Pope Sylvester I, declaring the donation of the city of Rome and the rule of the entire Western Roman Empire to the Pope and his successors. On these images concerning power, religion, and war, arrays of gems are orderly arranged, glittering, strict in composition, not only freezing a false historical narrative with extravagance but also that nostalgic classical solemn structure and grand scene. The themes of human life have not changed, but whether it is the transfer of power, surging wars, or religious fervor, they are already submerged in the cold exchange value of modernity. Deleuze and Guattari said that capital is a "motley painting of all that ever was." Zhang Zhaoying, in both form and content of his painting, sensitively responds to these insightful views on contemporary reality. "When capitalism truly arrives, what follows is the large-scale desacralization of culture."

The Theater of Heterotopia

Now, we need to return to the aesthetic and method of absurd theater that Zhang Zhaoying intends to achieve in his painting, as mentioned at the beginning. The invocation of theater is a valuable attempt to contemporize painting art: multiple dimensions of visual-body-situation are opened, breaking the conceptual impasse that painting faced after minimalism. Zhang’s theatrical practice in painting is manifested not only in his composition and scene organization—he does not simply and coherently "paint" images but "arranges" scenes like a director, adding characters and figures, arranging their positions; balancing between the natural and the contrived, making the picture appear as a "simulation," an artificially constructed scene, thereby reminding the viewer to switch from "viewing an object" to "experiencing a field."

And most importantly, his theater constructs a heterotopian space with the logic of an "absurd play"—an alternative space presented within the picture through the massive physical presence of painting, both isomorphic and contradictory to reality.

The appropriation and collage of images, the stripping of various symbols from their original contexts, result in broken narrative logic and suspended meaning. Zhang thereby creates a profound sense of absurdity within the picture. Like in the work Art Island, figures from art history—Velázquez’s dwarf jester, Holbein’s Henry VIII, Courbet’s self-portrait of the artist, etc.—descend upon the religious historical scroll painted by Fra Angelico, sharing a monastic life with the Holy Fathers in the Theban desert. The existence of these characters does not depend on causality; they are merely trapped together in a picture space where time is fractured. Zhang Zhaoying’s consistent use of large, "enterable" formats (4 meters wide) plunges us headlong into this desert island. At this moment, the huge canvas and theatrical scene become a symbolic stage; we participate in it yet remain outside. This illusory space, yet incompatible with real space— the perceptual tool provided by Foucault for understanding the operation of contemporary social space, culture, and power—is the heterotopia. Heterotopia is an exceptional space outside the system, reflecting and referring to the mainstream space through its own heterogeneity. In the heterotopian theater of Art Island, Zhang Zhaoying unfurls a long canvas, arranging an absurd play with numerous characters. Within this vast and bizarre space, he places a hint peeping into the future from the starting point of history, a hint about contemporary reality—classical values are already lost: just as they were once governed by divine faith, the narrative of art history has also lost. The fragments of art are scattered and fallen, like human destiny, they have become godless.

Finally, in the new works of this exhibition, the appropriation of elements from Hong Kong cinema further strengthens Zhang’s invocation of theater and the sense of the heterotopian play. The regional collective memory evoked by Hong Kong cinema, deeply influenced by Hollywood narrative structures and capital logic, is directly related to the flow of cultural identity in different spaces under the context of globalization. Collaged with the religious scenes from Western classical paintings that the artist habitually appropriates, this sum of heterogeneous elements coalesces into a flickering "cultural heterotopia" festival of lights: disparate identities and desires, vastly different geographies and customs; kung fu and priests, Cantonese jokes and Christian truths… juxtaposed and incompatible, yet indeed the true appearance of contemporary socio-cultural hybridity. Therefore, the heterotopian theater is not a utopia, a non-place; it is a trembling enclave reflecting reality—here, sensation and concept, fantasy and thought, embrace and critique all triumph simultaneously.