BEIJING — On a cold winter day in 2005, Zhao Zhao was in a car accident and bumped his head on the windshield. When he took the car for repair, the mechanic asked him if he would like to keep the glass or trade it in for a discount on a new one. Zhao not only kept the glass, he used it as the inspiration for his latest series of work “Constellations” debuting at Art Basel Hong Kong.
The surface of each rectangular glass pane is dotted with cracks of different shapes in various positions. “It seems there are no set forms to them and they appear to be random,” he said Zhao during our visit to his two-story redbrick house in Caochangdi Art Zone in Beijing. Unlike the glass cracks from the accident, these were made using a rifle.
It's not the first time Zhao used actual firearms to make art. In 2007, he purchased a Spanish made “Gamo” rifle on a popular Chinese online shopping site Taobao. “I was really surprised about how easy it is to get a gun in China where private gun ownership is illegal,” he said.
He didn’t keep that gun for long when the police came knocking on his door. “I found a hardware store and chopped the gun into pieces,” he recalled. He managed to show the chopped gun as one of his pieces in a group exhibition.
This year, when Zhao was discussing the idea for his solo booth with Chambers Fine Art, the cracked glass from the previous accident and the sentiment of the lost gun gave him the idea for “Constellations.”
However, with tightening gun-control laws, it has become much more difficult to get a gun. According to Zhao, the price for a rifle similar to the one he bought six years ago rose to 40,000 yuan ($6,500) from 7,000 yuan ($1,130). So this time, he paid off a shooting range in a mountainous village outside of Beijing.
The choice for the shooting range might seem like a compromise, and the work with the poetic title can also appear to be less explicitly provocative than his earlier works. But the transformation might just be Zhao morphing into a more matured and experienced artist.
“I’m trying to avoid the unnecessary trouble [with the government],” said Zhao. This is certainly a good rule to follow after the Chinese customs police confiscated a shipment of his earlier work last year.
“[My work] is less concerned with physical representation now,” said Zhao. Perhaps that's why in spite of the unintentional beauty from the bullet holes, there is also a reminiscence of history for Zhao as a Chinese artist shown through these transparent glass panes.