Hangzhou-based artist Zhao Meng is well-known for his ceramic versions of fantastically reimagined scholar’s rocks. The appreciation of scholar’s rocks comes from the literati tradition and its interest in “nature”. Scholar’s rocks of various forms and sizes are understood to be shaped by nature over hundreds or even thousands of years, but in many cases were in fact artificial fabrications understood to be “more authentic” than nature itself. Once present in the scholar’s studio, these rocks were miniaturized objects of contemplation and meditation, decorative objects that mediate the realms of culture and nature. Zhao’s work updates these binaries for the current era, tackling the tradition of scholar’s rocks with the challenging medium of ceramics, evoking this long tradition and rendering it both more sensual and more fragile. His works strike a balance between perception and preconception, his emphasis on material and tradition exposing the culturally constructed notion of tradition and nature.

Zhao’s art practice is in-keeping with the trend among Chinese contemporary artists, well-versed in traditional media, who choose to tackle traditional culture by rewriting it from within. The two works from Zhao featured in the sale, Ice Age (2006) (Lot 145) and Blue Pseudo Rock (2010) (Lot 144) are both emblematic of the artist’s signature style. Ice Age is reminiscent of Ai Weiwei’s The Waves, similarly made of celadon glazed ceramics. While Ai’s work intends to demonstrate the virtuosity of the material in solidifying a transient moment of crashing waves, Zhao’s Ice Age aims to use unctuously glazed ceramics to recreate the physical and tactic feeling of a glacier mass. Blue Pseudo Rock features a chrome blue, alien moonscape surface. Zhao’s impulses remind us of the works of Gu Wenda, whose pseudo ink ideograms were rearranged to create illicit new characters, therefore pointing to the arbitrariness of language. Taking form from combining the most desirable qualities of scholar’s rocks, Zhao’s blue rock is the perfect embodiment of the four criteria in judging the aesthetic qualities of a scholar’s rock: thinness (shou), openness (tou), perforations (lou), and wrinkling (zhou).