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Constellations
Zhao Zhao
赵赵
Production date
2017
Object Detail
Media
silk embroidery
Measurements
heptaptych 300 x 980 cm
Notes
After a 2005 car accident in which Zhao’s head smashed into the windscreen; he kept the shattered glass and made works inspired by its appearance in different materials including bronze and steel. Replicating the crazed patterns of the broken glass, Zhao created images of shocking, random violence. We are invited to extrapolate broader social implications from this singular autobiographical incident.
From these works Zhao developed a connected series, Constellations (2013––). Having seen images of bullet holes left after the June 1989 Tiananmen events, he purchased a gun (illegal in China) and fired it into sheets of glass. The firing of the gun was only a starting point: he began to make detailed oil paintings of the patterns made by the bullet holes, cracks and fine radiating lines that are surprisingly beautiful. As Zhao Zhao painted their starburst patterns with painstaking detail, they reminded him of the creation of stars and galaxies and of the pulsating energy of the universe. Later still, assisted by his mother, Zhao made these works in the form of silk embroideries; the violent moment of the bullet’s impact becomes a laboriously stitched work of overlapping radial forms and cracks recalling delicate spiderwebs. Constellations (2017), in the White Rabbit Collection, is a seven-panelled silk embroidery work measuring almost ten metres in width. Multiple bullet holes fracture its surface, their punctures surrounded by radiating lines. We think of the trajectory of the bullet, the shocking moment of impact, and the destruction wrought on human flesh by gun violence. Zhao describes his bullet holes as purposefully constructed, ‘a kind of orderly violence’. The contrast between a traditional Chinese craft and the modern image of the bullet hole, seen so often in popular culture, seems dissonant – although it was, after all, the Chinese who invented gunpowder.
From these works Zhao developed a connected series, Constellations (2013––). Having seen images of bullet holes left after the June 1989 Tiananmen events, he purchased a gun (illegal in China) and fired it into sheets of glass. The firing of the gun was only a starting point: he began to make detailed oil paintings of the patterns made by the bullet holes, cracks and fine radiating lines that are surprisingly beautiful. As Zhao Zhao painted their starburst patterns with painstaking detail, they reminded him of the creation of stars and galaxies and of the pulsating energy of the universe. Later still, assisted by his mother, Zhao made these works in the form of silk embroideries; the violent moment of the bullet’s impact becomes a laboriously stitched work of overlapping radial forms and cracks recalling delicate spiderwebs. Constellations (2017), in the White Rabbit Collection, is a seven-panelled silk embroidery work measuring almost ten metres in width. Multiple bullet holes fracture its surface, their punctures surrounded by radiating lines. We think of the trajectory of the bullet, the shocking moment of impact, and the destruction wrought on human flesh by gun violence. Zhao describes his bullet holes as purposefully constructed, ‘a kind of orderly violence’. The contrast between a traditional Chinese craft and the modern image of the bullet hole, seen so often in popular culture, seems dissonant – although it was, after all, the Chinese who invented gunpowder.
Accession number
2017.090