Zhao Gang: The Road to Serfdom

The stories of these figures resonate deeply for Zhao Gang (b. 1961, Beijing), who might have been one of them had he been born six or seven decades earlier. Instead he was to become the youngest member of the Stars Group, participating in some of post-1949 China’s earliest modern art exhibitions before embarking on an extended sojourn in Germany and New York. He returned to his hometown in the years just before the Beijing Olympics, armed with an intuitive understanding of the absurdity of his own class position and historical fate, and deeply amused by the idea that, in China today, there is room for a history painter with his dark sense of irony.