Zhao’s painting practice is often derived from direct observation of her day-to-day life. Zhao paints places she visits, streets she walks past, and objects she lives with, finding excitement in the mundane world. Referring to her love of easily overlooked ephemera, Zhao writes “the more I linger, the greater the need to transform them into paintings”. Recently, she has dedicated herself to painting on a miniature scale, capturing fragmentary snapshots of people, interiors, and landscapes. In order to create an intimate aura, Zhao retextures the surface of her canvases with various layers of paint and emphasizes dark, undersaturated colors.
New York, New York