Solace from Nature

This chapter presents five manifestations of “nature” in Zhao Wenliang’s work: places for tomb sweeping and remembering loved ones during the Qingming Festival; outdoor scenes connected to people and events in his life; natural subjects imbued with symbolic meaning; imagined landscapes of renowned sites; and natural scenes that inspired abstract expression. For the artist, nature carried rich and complex meanings, intertwined with the human spirit, symbolizing a longing for freedom, and serving as a vessel for melancholy and helplessness in times of adversity.

In his introduction to the No Name Group, Zhao wrote: “Painting is the concrete expression of the human spirit, something no power, no person, can ever extinguish. This is my belief, and it is also why, during those years of turmoil, I had the confidence to lead a group of young people devoted to painting, undeterred by difficulties, unafraid of pressure, turning away from the noise of politics to embrace nature, and persisting in our exploration of art’s true essence.” Zhao often ventured with fellow artists to the city’s edges or nearby suburbs, easel in hand. Parks, riverbanks, seasides, woods, mountains, and open fields, these seemingly ordinary places became their most vital creative sites. For Zhao, nature was never merely an object for sketching; it was also a spiritual refuge, a place to temporarily escape hardship and find solace for his anguish.

As the central subject of his work, nature was also an embodiment of beauty and imagination. A series of lotus and pond paintings created between 1975 and 1999 reveals Zhao’s diverse explorations beyond direct observation, his ability to paint from feeling and association, commanding the canvas with intuitive power. On August 12, 1978, China and Japan concluded the Treaty of Peace and Friendship between Japan and the People’s Republic of China in Beijing. Though he had never been to Japan, Zhao created multiple paintings of Mount Fuji in the following years, rendering the mountain as he imagined it, some works delicate and romantic, others dreamlike, still others approaching the patterned, with faint, tentative curves suggesting the mountain’s form, both vague and clear. In his depictions of nature, he also pushed toward more abstract expressions of painterly language, seeking an effect of “free nature.”