October 12th-November 30th   "Symphony of Red"
		"Venice Dreaming"   "Ying&Yang"
	"NudeB2"         "Symphony of Blue"

After his arrival in the United States in late 1986, Zhao began to take a great interest in the shape of square and developed his work with a high sense of pattern and rhythm. His grotto imagery was now endowed with historic mystery and religious sanctity in such a metaphysical way that the audience could not fail to notice Zhao¹s philosophical concerns. But these concerns were not intended to be verbally explicit. ³The artist¹s intuition is his source of inspiration. You first paint with your heart, rather than sense or logic, and then realize what you did and how you did it.² His philosophy is a mixture of faint fatalism, remote reverence for Buddhism and free interpretation of Taoist doctrines, in a certain sense a portrait of the oriental mentality in front of the Western culture. To his mind, square symbolizes the structure of the world, as opposed to the circle of ³Tai Ji², in which the balance of Yinand Yang maintain the ultimate harmony and stability of the universe. For example, his more recent work, the ³Universal Dialogue² and ³The Nine Suns² series were an effort to present a minimalist interpretation of the world. Zhao¹s squares contained the ancient past, the perplexing present, as well as the unknown future. With his touches and his color, Zhao has brought up a series of dichotomies of time and space, softness and toughness, Ying and Yang, and the union of the East and the West. The influence of the grottos is still there but basically fades into the cultural background. There is an increasing tendency towards abstraction and intentional negligence of balance. Some of his new work are distinguished with the frequent appearance of small black squares intermingled with irregular geometric shapes, the heavy touches of the primary colors and complimentary colors, and the use of multimedia materials such as sand and wax. All this renders Zhao¹s paintings more dynamic in his attempt to disclose a bewildered oriental soul wandering in the mystic Western culture. Leon Lee Art Critic, Chicago