The Solitary Figure

In the 1950s, China’s literary and art circles introduced various schools including realism, romanticism and symbolism from Western Europe, North America and Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries as well as all literary and artistic concepts and creative examples of genres emerged since the 20th century. While symbolism as a technique has long existed in artistic creation, its emergence as a distinct movement spanned roughly from the latter half of the 19th century to the early 20th century, a period bridging the end of Realism and the rise of Modernism. Then in France, intense social upheaval unsettled a generation of young artists, imbuing them with a deep fin de siècle melancholy. Symbolic creators emerged with the times found themselves immersed in the morbid beauty of Baudelaire’s poetry while also embracing pessimism and despair. They sought solace in mystery, religion, and fantasy, chanting of melancholy, decay, and sorrow, channeling the era’s despondency into the depths of the psyche. Symbolism revealed the secret affinities between the tangible world and the inner realm of thought.

Throughout his lifelong artistic career, Zhao Wenliang frequently employed symbolic and lyrical techniques to depict nature, render night scenes and paint portraits of his closest relatives and friends, imbuing his art with profound humanistic sentiment. Taking this as our point of entry, the first chapter gathers a group of small scale paintings from the 1950s, copies after Symbolist works, alongside scenes of the pre-dawn, dawn, and deep night from various periods, together tracing the artistic values that defined Zhao’s lifelong practice. In an environment where expression was constrained, the languages of symbolism and lyricism offered him a sensitive form for thought and feeling. Adhering to the principle that “all scenes speak of feelings,” Zhao remained devoted throughout his life to this vessel for unspoken anguish. His paintings are often filled with vast expanses of darkness, the sea, a lake, night fog, punctured by small points of light: a figure, a boat, the moon, the sun or a streetlamp. His images are dim and hazy, melancholy and profound. One can always catch a glimpse of a solitary figure or a small boat drifting on the boundless water, evoking the lines written by Shu Ting in To the Sea (1972): “The shore at dusk is as calm as night, The crags in the cold night are as stern as death, From shore to crag, how lonely my shadow.” (trans. Michelle Yeh, 1992)