Zhao Yao was born in 1981 in Luzhou, Sichuan Province. He graduated from the design arts department of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2004. He currently lives and works in Beijing.
Zhao has used his exhibitions to subvert the exhibition system itself, and to undermine the ecology of the art world. Part of that iconoclastic programme has been his ongoing series A Painting of Thought. This series poses questions such as: how do we look at a painting? How do we understand a painting? How do we create a painting? It seems that for Zhao everything is ready-made – and he is thinking not just of ready-made pigments, canvases and other materials, but also of our ready-made understanding of painting, art history and the art experience.
Zhao Yao’s work has been exhibited at Tate Modern (2010); Pinchuk Art Center, Kiev (2013), ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany (2013); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2013); Focus Beijing: the De Heus-Zomer Collection at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Netherlands (2014); Inside China at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2014); and Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915-2015 at Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015).