The rebirth of an artist

In 2000, artist and educator Zhao Dajun (1937-2023) was forced to stop painting with oils, his passion since the day in 1954 when he first enrolled at the Attached Secondary Art School of the Luxun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang, Liaoning province.

Overwork and neurological allergies, caused by prolonged exposure to oil paint, had led him to his second round of hospitalization.

Over the following eight years, Zhao painted sparingly, opting instead for rest. During his recovery period, he found solace and healing in nature.

"I began with excursions. I bought a tent, cooking pots and other necessaries for outdoor activities like camping," he said.

"Then, I went to the Xizang autonomous region with four friends. I remember that it was quiet all the way in Xizang, and from afar, we could hear birds. The changing sunlight and shadows cast by the trees greatly fascinated me.

"I particularly love the southeastern part of Xizang. The hundreds of peaks there are marvelous. Deep in them is the nature that I longed for."

The mystery of the snowcapped mountains gave Zhao fresh impetus. He produced dozens of paintings as a part of Sacred Mountains, a series that forms an important part of his oeuvre and marks his shift from the figurative to the semiabstract.

Geometry, a new exhibition at the Tsinghua University Art Museum until Oct 16, presents insight into Zhao's art and captures his intense feelings and absolute love for oil painting.

The exhibition includes 34 paintings and dozens of sketches that navigate the course he referred to as "his modernism", on which he embarked in the 1960s.

In geometric patterns he found inspiration that ushered him from realism into the realm of the expressive and the abstract, where he found his true identity as a painter.

Su Wei, the show's curator, says that the exhibition pays tribute to a man who neither enjoyed chatting endlessly about the past nor displayed the arrogance of one who is accomplished, but who wanted to do something extraordinary instead.

"He was one of the few artists who could exceed his own achievements in the later stage of his career," Su says.

Before being captivated by Xizang's mountains, Zhao had been under the influence of cubism, and the work of figures such as Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee encouraged him to think how to break forms down into geometric patterns.

He did not confine himself to simple mimicry, and experimented with ways of expressing the feel of the land and the culture that had nurtured him.

For example, he used the graphic tension in The Old Art School, one of the pieces on display, to capture his early years at the Luxun Academy of Fine Arts and his initial attempts, despite hardships, to establish an individual style.

He made the same attempt in the 1990s with The Smelter, another piece on display, in which he addressed the transformation of the industrial city of Shenyang, where he had lived for decades.

In the later stage of his life, Zhao simplified his brushwork and the structure of his work.

Su says that he drew a lot of short, oblique lines and made use of fewer colors to express the persistence underlying the order of his paintings, "the last brilliant works of his life".

Another key to Zhao's art was his love for classical music. He would spend time with a group of close friends listening to Gustav Mahler, Ludwig van Beethoven and Richard Wagner, whose "great movements" were important to him.

In the rhythms of music he found the same spirituality as what he found in nature. He spoke of once camping with friends in Luorong Pasture in Sichuan province, where, unable to sleep, he slipped out of his tent.

"I was suddenly enraptured by the view of the snowy mountains. I just sat there and couldn't take my eyes off them," he recalled.

"I thought they were deeply impressed in my mind, but when I painted them after I came home, I was not able to fully convey the same marvelous feeling of that night and the spirituality of the mountains."

Du Pengfei, executive director of the Tsinghua University Art Museum, says that Zhao conceived the Sacred Mountains series after he turned 60.

He often said that the series was part of a process of breaking his own rules and smashing himself into pieces, during which he questioned the connections between art and life, and allowed himself to rediscover the true meanings of art and life, Du explains.

"Later, he went further in dropping some themes in his work, and gave his paintings numerical titles, which was a way to remove limits and reinvent himself," he says.

"How courageous he was to recreate himself, and how precious that he was reawakened with creativity."