Rockbund Art Museum

Zhao Xuebing was born in Bejing in 1967. He moved to Paris in 2002 and then to New York in 2007. Now he lives and works in Shanghai. Zhao Xuebing is involved in the creation of amazing drawings and paintings in which the line takes up an important role in the way it constructs the space. His extreme meticulousness in creating the figures with an extra-fine ink pen on canvas leads to an impressive overall complex and dense space in which the eye demands to penetrate little by little into the infinite interlacing of lines, like in the outstanding example of his 140 soldiers without faces.

Zhao Xuebing is also interested in painting landscapes from photography, like the stunning Central Park series, where the over-exposed white and blue light produces an impression built up from thousands of very tiny circles and lines which produce this strange space between painting and photography. He has studied painting since his childhood, and is adept at applying unique painting techniques like capturing the light just as the aperture of a camera does.