Zhao Gang: The Road to Serfdom

For this exhibition, titled after Friedrich von Hayek’s 1944 treatise on the perils of a planned economy, Zhao Gang began with a found image of “Elite from China’s Republican Era” forwarded to him by a friend, eventually taking a long road trip to the homes of the men it pictured. A massive portrait of this revered, unfortunate group is offset by quieter images, painted and photographed, of the towns from which they come and the spaces they once inhabited. Further paintings riff
on related themes: the legacy of imperial systems, political and aesthetic; the inevitability of death; and, amidst it all, the awkward position of the artist and his
fraught medium of painting.