Zhou Shichao - Monography

A bilingual book

Teacher and artist

Born in 1965 in Qingdao (Shandong), Zhou Shichao was quick to reject the dictatorship of the subject and the conventions of the Academy: the idea of independence very soon came to dominate Zhou Shichao's destiny. Add to this the idea of music and metamorphosis, and you have all the ingredients that have shaped the exceptional destiny of this Chinese painter who, in addition to teaching at Jinan University, exhibited his work between 1998 and 2000 in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kon, and in 2010 in Marseille.

A style between division and explosion

As we observe his oils and gouaches, we perceive his division of matter, his dislocation of light from the prism and the explosion of color. In the end, Zhou Shichao is like composers who practice all forms of fragmentation, fragmentation and decomposition of sounds and timbres. The painter, on the other hand, reproduces on his linen canvas or laid paper the subtle sensations of lightning strikes and the fleeting impressions of prophetic visions, brought to their maximum intensity by a sovereign imagination. His works are imbued with a powerful ancestral spirit that comes straight from the depths of a thousand-year-old civilization (ancient epigraphs engraved on the house where Confucius was born, cave paintings in the Buddhist caves of Mogao in Dunhuang, tales of the valiant knights of the wuxia who have enchanted schoolchildren in the Middle Kingdom since the end of the 19th century).

Claude Darras: art and literature critic

In this book, the author sets out to collect the artist's works by period, from his schoolboy sketches to the paintings in the Chinese state collection. Claude Darras, a journalist with agency, magazine and daily newspapers, as well as an academic, went out to meet Zhou Shichao's teachers, friends, colleagues and acquaintances, to bring you a true portrait of the artist in this bilingual French-English work!