Roberts & Tilton is pleased to present ⽆所不在 Omnipresent, Beijing based artist Zhao Zhao’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

Zhao Zhao is one of China’s most interesting young contemporary artists. Living and working in Beijing, Zhao’s practice expresses a personal and bold reflexivity of the political unrest and contentions of a barred society. His paintings, sculptures and videos move beyond institutional and political critique, as they reveal something more provocative; the hushed realities grappled by his home country.

As a former assistant to Ai Weiwei, Zhao Zhao is no stranger to complexities and set backs caused by political anxieties. Although of a different generation than his mentor, growing up in the post-Maoist era, Zhao too has experienced the tarrying consequences of revolutionary objectives first hand. Despite the many impediments regulated by the government, Zhao Zhao fervently continues to exquisitely deliver his radical concepts through art.

The exhibition will feature a series of oil on canvas paintings based on Beijing’s notorious skies. Beijing’s environment and population have suffered from unregulated pollution that is ever generating record-breaking levels of toxicity and hazardous environmental and health concerns. These paintings depict skies that are neither airy nor bright, but opaque, tempestuous, and weighted by bellowing hues of oscillating darkness. The skies exist in a time indistinguishable from day and night, sumptuously delineating an asphyxiation of aeriform.

Zhao Zhao will also present a sculptural work that is comprised of a number of found demolished Buddha sculptures destroyed in the aftermath of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a span of over a decade in which the government sought to destroy ancient historical and cultural artifacts. Zhao harvests these relics and composes them into a perfect cube, cultivating a metaphor for the persistence of beliefs despite their altering forms.

Zhao Zhao’s charge to produce provocative works despite the many tensions and repercussions of political repression is unwavering. The pangs of a suppressed society supply a drive to give a voice to the silenced and light to the overshadowed.

Zhao Zhao received his BFA from Xinjiang Institute of Arts in China. He has been featured in solo exhibitions at Alexander Ochs Gallery, Berlin; Chambers Fine Art, Beijing; Taikang Space, Beijing, and China Art Archives and Wavehouse, Beijing.