One Second

One second is the time limitation of painting. Time can be seen through this limitation, and one second would appear differently.

The great distinction between one second and one year sometime could be subtle as well. Many things could be changed in one year, or perhaps nothing happens. Zhao painted numerous lines by the second. Short and constrained, they exist in their way but appear to be trivial and meaningless. Two of these line paintings were dramatically blown up, which took a whole year for Zhao to finish them. Considering 31,536,000 seconds in a year, it may seem like a work in vain. However, for his own life of the year, no matter how much attention he had paid to this painting, it finally became a sporadic memory. We all have similar experiences: time flies, and the future remains uncertain, just like a sealed book.

The juxtaposition of one second and one year is like a story with an untold beginning and ending. Thus, people can imagine any unknown happenings during this period. Things may be trivial, painful or depressive, but perhaps he is so happy that he doesn’t care about it.

When One Second appears as a conceptual action, it raises a challenge to painting, and counters against slow temporality, controllability, and repeatability in the history of painting. In other words, One Second is the questioning to time or the span of life. However, more or less, there is a touch of heroism.