In 1988 a fire roared through his Chinatown studio. Months later another blaze devastated several River North galleries, including the one representing him. “I lost everything,” says painter Weiliang Zhao, who was in his mid-40s and had been a U.S. resident for only two years. “So I must do new work.” The time had come, he resolved, to change his style. Within days he made a dramatic shift toward abstract painting. “In China everyone did realistic style. Almost all Chinese artists do.”
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After the cultural revolution, he had often gone to the library at Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University, where he was a professor of art, to study a book showing the work of such artists as Picasso and van Gogh. “Before the revolution you could not open the book. Everybody painted Mao portraits. Nobody changed. Maybe I was the first one. I want Western modern and Eastern mystery together.”
“My work is not East. It’s not West. It’s mine. I want to develop my art. I want to find original ideas. It’s very difficult.”
