By Gan Ting

Introduction: The Curtain Rises on Image-Deicide

"Where now is the great Goliath?" cries David, the shepherd boy in pink robes, standing among the Philistines. He swears he has slain both lion and bear, and that those who mock the God of Zion will perish today as they did. He draws back, knee bent, his slingshot already aimed at the bronze-armored giant Goliath, now in range. The strap pulls taut. This is a tantalizing moment, an archetypal moment of historical victory or its negation.

And so, Goliath's head is replaced by that of Karl Marx. Within this narrative scroll, one that looks back at a biblical story from the Renaissance, amid the classical grandeur of golden armies and gleaming rivers, typical images of the nascent capitalist consumer society—vintage cars and middle-class men and women in swimsuits from 1960s and 70s films and advertisements—slide into the bottom of the scroll, participating in and witnessing the slaying of Marx, the challenger to modern capitalism. His head is severed, along with the grand theory and critical spirit he symbolizes.

When we grasp the logical implications and revelations of Zhang Zhaoying's image-play in Warrior: Marx's Promise, we understand that his tireless investigation, appropriation, collage, and theatrical, stage-like arrangement of images are not just an attempt at an aesthetic and method of the absurd achievable in painting. More importantly, he is consciously documenting and constructing a contemporary reality: image implosion, where meaning dissolves within the medium, and history is flattened from a state of depth and complexity into fragmented images and symbols, reduced from a continuous process full of causality, pain, struggle, and meaning into a plane of arbitrary, juxtaposable moments.

Furthermore, he employs this complicit strategy to create a vast and profound heterogeneous space within the painting—an accessible heterotopian theater. With all manner of bizarre incompatibilities, he smashes this frenzied visual structure of contemporary life in our faces, while also, with both innocence and ambition, using a sense of play to mark history's abeyance in reality, seeking to bridge the transmission of history that he can grasp.

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

The "Lifelong" (终身) series, which implies a certain continuity, arrives at the "Yinghua" (映画) section. "Yinghua" (a term I translate as Cinematic Painting) relates first to the film elements in Zhang's new works. Second, "Ying" (to project/reflect) and "Hua" (image/painting), as both nouns and verbs, summarize his methodology: reflecting the visual frenzy of this era. Facing the Society of the Spectacle, only an excess of images can reveal its related mysteries. He uses postmodern collage to  that all historical moments have become flat fragments, ready to be deployed at any time, yet he still, amid the loss of history and the eternal present, strives to reflect and refer to reality.

It is easy to feel, standing before Zhang Zhaoying's work, that this is a canvas at the pinnacle of the world's contemporary visual experience. There is no empty space, no aperture; dense and saturated symbols surge—masterpieces of classical painting, portraits of historical figures, film stills, consumerist totems... a forest of things, all in reserve. Real life has been replaced by this colossal representation. When Zhang uses his canvas to respond to Guy Debord's "Society of the Spectacle," he grasps and presents its core mechanism: the capture, guidance, and stimulation of human desire by excessive images and symbols.

In Mr. "Pan"'s Feast, Jan Brueghel the Younger's The Allegory of Taste serves as the appropriated background. The abundant food and banquet scene it depicts is a pre-modern landscape of desire, pointing to physiological needs directly related to survival and joy. More modern foods—hamburgers, pasta, cocktails—are superimposed and collaged into the scene, along with the recurring symbols of modern consumerism: cars, women in swimsuits, middle-class leisure. At this point, vital needs are directly transmuted into excessive desire. Even more significantly, the head of Venus, the goddess whom the instinct- and libido-driven Pan attempts to seduce, is replaced by the head of a Western man from a 60s or 70s movie poster. Has modern Eros also been displaced and lost in the consumption of images of sex and beauty?

Fredric Jameson's theory of postmodern culture mentions the "loss of historicity": in the torrent of images from capitalist consumer society, history is no longer remembered as a deep narrative or experience, but is transformed into a surface of images, symbols, and sensations. In a series of fragmented extractions, appropriations, collages, reproductions, and disseminations, form is simulated while essence and meaning are revoked. In his stacked and flattened visual theater, Zhang Zhaoying stages this very drama, where historical consciousness has collapsed and historical depth can no longer be traced.

Yet Zhang himself is not a complete postmodernist; his appropriation and parody do not tend toward a "zero-degree" state. Nor, however, can one say he possesses any modernist critical passion. He simply possesses a strong self-awareness of the individual's place within a reality that is simultaneously a historical process, and he desires to respond and refer to that reality and history. As he states himself: "The problems of history and today are still manifest. I need to transmit information."

The use of Constantine the Great in the Eastern Story series is just such a piece of information about contemporary capitalist reality. One of the appropriated original paintings in this series depicts a pseudo-historical event: Constantine the Great kneeling before Pope Sylvester I, donating the city of Rome and the entire Western Roman Empire to the Pope and his successors. On this scene of power, religion, and war, orderly arrays of gems are arranged, glittering and rigid. They not only freeze this false historical narrative in a cold, luxurious state, but also its classical, solemn structure and grand scale. The themes of human life have not changed, but whether it is the transfer of power, the surge of war, or religious fervor, all are now submerged in modern, cold exchange value. Deleuze and Guattari said that capital is a "motley painting [une peinture bariolée] of everything that has ever been." Zhang Zhaoying's work, in both form and content, responds with agility to these astute insights into contemporary reality: "When capitalism truly arrives, what follows is the large-scale desacralization of culture."

Heterotopian Theater

We must now return to the point mentioned at the beginning: the aesthetic and method of the absurd that Zhang Zhaoying intends to achieve in painting. The use of theater is a valuable attempt to contemporize painting, opening up multiple dimensions—visual, corporeal, situational—and breaking the conceptual deadlock for which painting was criticized after reaching minimalism. Zhang's theatrical practice in painting is evident not only in his composition and staging—he does not simply "paint" images coherently, but "directs" a scene like a director, adding characters and figures, arranging their positions. In a balance between the natural and the artificial, the painting appears as a "verisimilitude" [ni zhen], an artificially constructed scene. This hereby prompts the viewer to switch from an "object of viewing" to an "experiential field."

Most importantly, his theater uses the logic of the "absurd" to construct a heterotopian space. With painting's immense material presence, it presents an alternative space within the frame that is both isomorphic with and paradoxical to reality.

The appropriation and collage of complex images, with various symbols stripped of their original contexts, creates a rupture in narrative logic and a suspension of meaning. Zhang uses this to forge a profound sense of the absurd. As in the work Art Island, figures from art history—Velázquez's court dwarf, Holbein's Henry VIII, Courbet's "The Artist"—descend into a religious scroll by Fra Angelico, sharing a monastic life with the Holy Fathers in the Theban desert. Their existence is non-causal; they are simply trapped together in a pictorial space of temporal rupture. Zhang's consistent, "accessible" large-scale (4-meter wide) format makes us plunge into this desert island. Here, the enormous canvas and meticulous staging become a symbolic stage; we are both participants and outsiders. This "illusory-real" [huan zhen] space, incompatible with real space, is precisely Foucault's perceptual tool for understanding space, culture, and power in contemporary society: Heterotopia.

A heterotopia is an exceptional space outside the system. Its heterogeneity reflects and refers to mainstream space. In the heterotopian theater of Art Island, Zhang Zhaoying unfurls a long canvas and arranges an absurd drama with a multitude of characters. In this vast, bizarre space, he places a prompt, one that peers into the future from the origin of history, a prompt about contemporary reality: classical values are lost. Like the former faith that ruled all, the narrative of art history has failed. The fragments of art are scattered and fallen; like human destiny, they have become masterless things [wu zhu zhi wu / res nullius].

Finally, the appropriation of Hong Kong film elements in the new works reinforces Zhang's use of theater and the significance of the heterotopian theater. The regional collective memory evoked by Hong Kong cinema, deeply influenced by Hollywood narrative structures and the logic of capital, relates directly to the circulation of cultural identity in different spaces within the context of globalization. Collaged with the Western classical religious scenes the artist habitually appropriates, this sum of heterogeneities coalesces into a festival of light and shadow, a "cultural heterotopia": disparate identities and desires, distinct geographies and customs; Kung Fu and priests, Cantonese jokes and Christian truths... an incompatible juxtaposition, but it is precisely the hybrid reality [hunsheng] of contemporary culture.

Therefore, the heterotopian theater is not a utopian void [xu wu zhi di]. It is a vibrating enclave that maps reality—a place where sensation and concept, fantasy and thought, embrace and critique simultaneously achieve a total victory.