Zhao Zhong-Zao

Born: 1931

The White Lotus Gallery is proud to present the works of Zhao Zhong-Zao.

Selected available works


Poem by Du Fu 16 1/2" x 24"	Poem by Du Fu 16 1/2" x 24"

Poem by Chang Jian 16 1/2" x 24"	Rocky Coast 18" x 26"

Yellow Mountain No. 2 22 1/2" x 18"	Yellow Mountain: Cliff 22 1/2" x 18"

Yellow Mountain: Cloud 17 3/4" x 24"	Yellow Mountain: Fog 22 1/2" x 18

Yellow Mountain: Pine 18" x 23"

Zhao Zhong-Zao was born in 1931 in Jiangying county of Jiangsu province. He began his distinguished career as a printmaker in 1950 as a young student in the Fine Arts Department at Nanjing University. From 1955, Professor Zhao taught at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts where he was appointed Dean of the Engraving Department from 1978 to 1983. From 1983 to 1987, Professor Zhao was the vice-president of the China National Academy of Fine Arts, where he still presently active.

Accomplished in calligraphy and traditional Chinese ink painting as well as printmaking, Professor Zhao has been named an Artist of Brilliant Contribution by the State Council of the Chinese government. Holding several posts such as council member of the China Artists’ Association and standing member of the Council of Chinese Printmaker’s Association, Zhao’s work has been collected by museums internationally including the British Museum in London, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the Fine Arts Museum of Sydney, Australia, the China National Museum of Fine Arts, the Moscow Museum of Oriental Culture, and the Fine Arts Museum of Yokohama, Japan.

Yellow Mountain series

Zhao’s Yellow Mountain series is at once reminiscent of traditional Chinese ink painting and modern graphic art – an effect achieved as much through technique as subject. In prints subtitled Pine, Cloud, Cliff, and Fog, Zhao translates into nearly abstract forms the mysterious beauty of the ancient and monumental Huangshan rocks of southern Anhui province, where according to Chinese legend, the Yellow Emperor found immortality and ascended into the heavens on a dragon. Using a printing technique called shuiyin that originated in this area over three hundred years ago, Zhao achieves the misty atmospheric effect in these prints by watercoloring blocks that are then pressed against multi-layered paper dampened with water. The subtle gradations in tone and soft blurring effect is closer in feeling to a wash painting than a woodblock print but as Michael Sullivan has pointed out in Art and Artists of Twentieth Century China, Zhao’s affinity for the block itself - seen in the way he uses the wood’s grain to suggest the texture of the rocks and clouds - makes Huangshan Rocks “one of the first truly modern prints produced in the People’s Republic.”