I don’t think anyone in the audience expected either of the distinguished Zhou brothers to enter the room looking like a cross between Manchurian emperors and Chicago pimps.
The balding, Chinese artists strolled in sporting goatees, long black hair, shiny red and white suits fit for Jay-Z and matching shiny shoes. Shedding their jackets they each picked up a seven-foot wooden pole with brushes attached to each end and plunged it into one of the six gallon buckets of paint. This “painting performance” last Tuesday at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St., celebrated their exhibit, “Zhou Brothers: 30 Years of Collaboration.”
“This is the first time both sides have brushes,” said Shan Zhou, 52, gleefully admiring his artistic weapon like a new toy.
The brothers worked swiftly and silently on the 16-by-9-foot canvas, aided by an eerily effective, quiet communication that stems from 30 years of making art together. Both painters dove at the canvas: One drew a bird-like human figure with slow, sensual strokes, and the other applied broad strokes like a house painter eager to finish and go home. While his brother perfected the curves of the central figure, Da Huang looked intently at a large painter’s bucket before hurling its entire brown contents at the canvas.
The audience’s delight defied the hypothesis that an intimate look at the painting process risks destroying its magic. Imagine discovering that Picasso painted “Guernica” with a paint-by-numbers and Jackson Pollack created his masterpieces with one lazy hand while reading the Sunday comics. When looking at paintings in a museum, I don’t always want to think of the artists as human or see the works as products of a calculated process. I prefer to envision the painting’s birth as a momentous explosion of creative emotion, shooting straight from the artists mind to the canvas.
The Zhou brothers have made that vision into reality. Watching the “painting performance,” I had the feeling the duo knew precisely what they were doing while having no recognizable vision. They weaved in an out of each other, never blocking the other from painting, once discarding their brushes in favor of hands. Several times they changed or simply painted over a section of their partner’s work.
Without warning, one brother signed “Zhou” in the bottom right corner of the canvas and they both dropped their poles, facing the audience with smiles.
“It is wonderful to imagine the thought process,” said Dee Bass, a Chicago resident who often visits the Chicago Cultural Center. “You think jokingly if they ever throw paint at each other.”
The end product was a painting titled “Passion.” Although Da Huang Zhou, 47, insisted he and his brother had not discussed the painting before beginning, the whole process took less than 15 minutes.
“30 Years of Collaboration” is the first retrospective Zhou brothers exhibit in Chicago, and the more than 200 fans who came to see the performance were the “die-hard believers,” according to Cultural Center curator of exhibits Lanny Silverman, who referred to the Zhou brothers fan base as a “rock star audience.”
“I’d never seen anything quite like it,” Silverman said. “There was someone waiting since three o’clock to save a seat in the front row and a guy in the front row hoping to get splattered with paint. People made off with brushes like guitar splinters from Peter Frampton.”
The two overwhelmingly popular local artists certainly play the part. Having changed into sharp, black, collarless suits after painting, the brothers spent the rest of the evening happily complying with endless requests for hand shakes, autographs and pictures. The friendly artists answered questions almost shyly, repeatedly giving each other credit. When asked which contemporary artist he was influenced by, Da Huang Zhou put his hand on Shan’s shoulder and exclaimed, “This guy.”
The exhibition paintings, according to the brothers, largely represent their journey from China to Chicago. The brothers and their father were blacklisted before the cultural revolution in China. Despite success there, the brothers moved to Chicago after an invitation for an exhibit and for the last 16 years have spent almost half of each year in the city.
“We feel Chicago is our home,” Shan said.
This realization of the American dream is reflected in several of their paintings, including the large “Dream of Chicago” and a blue-toned “Searching the Dream.” Many of their paintings contain strong resemblances to neolithic cave art that was near their home in Laos. Their art first was recognized in China under Deng Xiaoping, who in part opened China to the West.
“They were among the forerunners of what became a wave of Chinese contemporary art,” Silverman said.
The exhibit, which starts with their work from the ’80s when they first came to Chicago, displays a change from earth tones to bright reds with black and white contrasts, influenced by the “communist change in China,” Shan said.
“I think they’re bold for bringing it all out,” said Vivian Sakellariou, 28, a local painter and sculptor. “When you see all these lines and marks and textures, it’s like an experiment and they put a name on it.”
The Zhou brothers also are putting their name on the Chicago art scene, signed with a brush that someone probably will steal after the show.4
Medill sophomore Crystal Nicholson is the PLAY theater editor. She can be reached at [email protected].