Since Zhao Fang’s graduation from the Jilin Academy of Fine Arts, China in 1997, his works have met with accolades and popular acclaim, not least for his obvious mastery over his medium, but also for his admirable anti-violence stance. Zhao Fang paints with the vocabulary of a classical renaissance style, achieving incredible depth of form and movement in human anatomy by poising his subjects in a moment of torsion, receding into and reaching out of the canvas through light and shadow. By capturing motion through his subject’s anatomy, Zhao Fang’s use of foreshortening imbues form and function into his composition, and captures the humanity of his vision. | ![]() |

Since Zhao Fang’s graduation from the Jilin Academy of Fine Arts, China in 1997, his works have met with accolades and popular acclaim, not least for his obvious mastery over his medium, but also for his admirable anti-violence stance. Zhao Fang paints with the vocabulary of a classical renaissance style, achieving incredible depth of form and movement in human anatomy by poising his subjects in a moment of torsion, receding into and reaching out of the canvas through light and shadow. By capturing motion through his subject’s anatomy, Zhao Fang’s use of foreshortening imbues form and function into his composition, and captures the humanity of his vision.
It is through this technical finesse that Zhao Fang can transform the muscular physique of his subjects into a delicate form suggesting, through his progression of dramatic stills, imminent injury and what this entails in terms of life and death. Zhao Fang develops this dynamic motion of thought by presenting his work in diptychs, and indeed triptychs, thus achieving a notion of reciprocation; cause and effect are central ideas that Zhao Fang focuses on. By showing that humans respond to and exist in a world governed by physics, Zhao Fang allows his subject matter to be caught in a moment where every action has an equal and opposite reaction; pull is juxtaposed with push; throwing from behind is shown in conjunction with shooting ahead, or in fact, “a head.”
Wit and metaphor are used to great effect in this manner, and Zhao Fang is well aware of the implications of his work, suggesting the interdigitation of our humanity by literally interlocking fingers as they ply apart and fumble together in a series of emotionally charged pieces. Hinging his understanding of our physical mortality as humans on how we relate to and touch each other, Zhao Fang illuminates his oeuvre with the vitality of feeling and the communal physicality that we share, thus heightening the spiritual resonance of the sensual tangibility that we experience within our corporeal bodies.