Antiquity Aflame: Zhao Zhao’s Folded Time

Time, for Zhao Zhao, is not a line but a crust folding back on itself. In his new body of work, the artist uses cotton, a convex lens, fire, dust, and mark-making to return to matter a memory older than we are. Antiquity and Sky Fire do not reenact the past; they short-circuit it with the present, as if ocean floors, the Taklamakan, and the Gobi plains could rise to the surface of painting. His research braids visual archaeology with contemporary gesture: zigzag motifs drawn from archaic ceramics, essential geometric forms, scorch marks that are both process and image. The picture is built in layers and frictions - between documentation and myth, industry and totem - until the surface becomes a field of forces where nature and history interrogate each other. Zhao does not illustrate; he lays bare the tools that turn experience into icon, from hot stamping to solar combustion. Thus cotton ceases to be fiber or economic symbol and becomes organism, measure of duration, ash and light. His painting, pared back and magnetic, avoids the didactic; it prefers the spark, the minimal event that reignites the unknown.