Zhao Yao works across painting, sculpture, video, and large-scale site-specific installations. In his Landscape series, he brings the idea of painting back to its material roots. Drawing from the naming systems of paint manufacturers, Zhao selects colour names that evoke landscape imagery and seals the corresponding paints into seven-inch transparent cards. Although the colours are precisely mixed by machines, they remain partially unblended, revealing interwoven patterns that resemble abstract landscapes.
Visitors are invited to draw cards from the display, flip through them, and make selections based on their titles and visual qualities. As we look at these fragments of "landscape," it becomes clear that the names are not just marketing tools used by manufacturers to boost sales—they also tap into deeply rooted cultural and aesthetic associations. At the same time, the cards—seemingly inexhaustible yet inherently scarce due to the impossibility of exact replication—vividly reveal the tensions of consumer culture through the audience's repeated acts of looking and choosing.
Title:
360°: Why We Paint?
Dates:
16 May 2025 – 12 October 2025
Venue:
BY ART MATTERS, 1# OōEli, 398 Tianmushan Rd., Xihu District, Hangzhou, China
