Artist: Zhao Gang

Zhao Gang’s second solo presentation with Lisson Gallery The Basterd Gentry, curated by independent curator Evonne Jiawei Yuan, extends his ongoing depiction of landscape, portraiture and still life into an elaborate, performative triad. Coinciding with Shanghai’s art season, the project is structured as an ongoing enactment of exhibitions and conversations across multiple locations in Shanghai, including ASE Foundation and 185 Space of the Bund Art Center.

The Basterd Gentry stands as Zhao’s most autobiographical project to date, rooted in the complex negotiation of self-positioning and identity formation over the past four decades—a period during which he has built parallel careers in art and finance across Beijing and New York. Situated at the intersection of reality, representation, and projection, the project interrogates the three roles Zhao embodies—the painter, the butcher, and the banker—within a post-global, multipolar framework, foregrounding the dialectical tensions and entanglements among them. Staged across three symbolically resonant venues, The Basterd Gentry reveals how Zhao, cloaked in the guise of a ‘gentleman,’ conducts an unflinching examination of identity construction, power dynamics, and the very nature of existence from a deliberately detached standpoint.

Act One: Shadow | Lisson Gallery Shanghai | 12 November 2025 – Spring 2026

The first act, ‘Shadow,’ is presented at Lisson Shanghai, housed within the former Central Bank Warehouse Building—a site emblematic of East–West confluence that resonates with the cross-cultural perspective central to Zhao’s practice. The eight new works, all created in 2025, exemplify a deconstructive and defamiliarizing approach through which the artist reconfigures portraiture—often rendered as expressionless, signification-void silhouettes, sublime landscapes, and their underlying archetypes. These social-realist compositions are marked by romanticised, imagined topographies and spontaneous brushwork, informed by what may be termed Zhao’s retrospective capitalist consciousness. Beneath a veneer of genteel refinement lies a profound skepticism toward belonging and alienation. Here, painting moves beyond formal self-reference to become a generative site where subjectivity dissolves into a state of ‘non-self’—an act of othering that turns inward, gesturing toward a void of fixed meaning or destination.

Act Two: Flesh | ASE Foundation | 9 November 2025 – 27 March 2026

The second act, ‘Flesh,’ on display at the ASE Foundation, occupies a viewing room in a space located in the former French Concession, a neighborhood imbued with historical resonance. Zhao’s monumental ‘meatscapes’ function as visceral tableaux vivants. Adopting the persona of the ‘butcher’—a figure channeling a Tarantinoesque ethos in which violence serves as brutal rationality and revenge becomes a dark ritual—the artist reconceives the canvas as an abattoir and the brush as a scalpel. This dissective methodology enacts what might be called a ‘gastronomic critique’: flesh, positioned at the crossroads of the memento mori tradition and biopolitical discourse, becomes a medium through which systems of exploitation are laid bare. Much like Tarantino’s revisionist histories, which rework trauma through cinematic catharsis, Zhao’s work stages a parallel intervention—bodies are systematised, disciplined, ‘seasoned’ for consumption, and ultimately resurrected as forensic evidence.

Act Three: Debt (Artist talk) | Space 185 of the Bund Art Center | 1:30 – 2:15pm, 12 November 2025

The third act, ‘Debt,’ takes shape as a dialogue between Zhao and scholar Lu Mingjun, moderated by the curator, on on 12 November at Space 185 of the Bund Art Center. The conversation responds to the architectural presence of the building—formerly the Shanghai office of Mitsui & Co., a site deeply embedded in the city’s cosmopolitan history—to reflect on themes of global circulation and ethical responsibility. Focusing on Zhao’s experience as an investment banker in New York during the late 1990s and early 2000s, the discussion traces the intellectual dilemmas that arose from his navigation of both the financial and art worlds. Together with Zhao, both Lu and Yuan—longtime collaborators of the artist—examine how the gestures and subjects in his paintings ‘devour’ notions of individualism, compassion, and humanity. This dialogue aims to illuminate a visual economy in which what is depicted and what is owed become inextricably intertwined, evoking the Deleuzian notion that every surface is, ultimately, a body without organs—a site of perpetual conversion and debt.