Zhao Zhao was born in Xinjiang in 1982. He graduated from the Xinjiang Institute of Arts in 2003, and attended the Beijing Film Academy. He was Ai Weiwei’s assistant before he became an influential artist of the post-1980s generation.
Zhao Zhao’s body of work amounts to an analysis of China’s contemporary profile, and of the socio-political consequences of individual human action. In A Slap to the Face (2014), he struck people in the name of performance art. In Secret Love (2014) he stabbed fellow contemporary artist Sun Yuan in the back.
Violence, deliberate or accidental, is a recurrent theme. Zhao Zhao suffered a car accident in which his head slammed into the windshield. He was afterwards amazed by the patterns formed in the cracked glass at the point of impact. This led to a series of hyper-realistic paintings called Constellations, depicting bullet impacts on shatter-proof glass panes. They reminded the artist of the whorls and spirals of interstellar galaxies, hence the name of the series. Exhibited alongside Constellations was Officer (2011), in which a limestone statue of a Chinese police officer lay broken in pieces on the ground. The statue was made when Ai Weiwei was arrested in 2011, and the badge number of the shattered policeman corresponds to the date Ai Weiwei was taken into custody.
For a later addition to the Constellations series, Zhao Zhao inserted jade from Gansu province into glass. Jade has long been a part of traditional rituals, and is seen to possess protective powers as well as healing energies. For Project Taklamakan (2016), Zhao Zhao deposited a refrigerator full of local Xinjiang beer in the middle of the Taklamakan Desert, in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.
Exhibitions include: Control, Mizuma Art Gallery, Singapore and Roberts Project, Los Angeles (2019); In Extremis, Tang Contemporary Beijing (2018); One Second – One Year, Tang Contemporary Art, Hong Kong (2018). Zhao Zhao has participated in many group museum exhibitions, including Humboldt Lab Dahlem, Museum of Art, Berlin (2013); Zero Tolerance, MoMA PS1, New York (2014); Time is a Saw: Established and Emerging Contemporary Chinese Artists, Crossman Gallery, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater (2014); and JingShen: The Act of Painting in Contemporary China, Padiglione d’arte Contemporanea, Milan (2016).