Beautiful & Joyous Images – On Zhou Weihua’s Paintings By Zhu Qi

Zhou Weihua’s paintings reflect the world as an image-making factory. By choosing public images and processing them through a personal filter, he screens a series of valuable spiritual images, which allowing his paintings to enter a cultural image ideology. These self-reflective images present a parallel to human existence. For example, he paints icons of the past (which are ever-present in today’s media) mixed with the young, Chinese generation, all expressing total satisfaction and jumping for the sky.

All of the images are beautiful and joyful in his paintings. You never see misery or tragedy. Zhou Weihua uses images that appear in documentaries and the media. These images are not connected to his private life; they are images of public consumption. Two main categories of people appear on his canvases. The first type is famous icons of the past: such as politician Mao Zedong and Che Guevara; film stars Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn and Zhou Xuan; singing legend John Lennon with wife Yoko Ono; socialist model-worker Lei Feng; culturalists Lu Xun and Bernarad Shaw and Cai Yuan Pei. The second type of people in Zhou’s paintings is unknown people with physical characteristics which match modern society’s ideals.

Zhou Weihua visually quotes public images. His paintings are a discussion of displaced images in both time and space. For example, in the series “Carefree” and “Playing Together,” historical figures come to modern China and view a modern city. There are scenes of a Zhong Kui play behind Audrey Hepburn. Zhong Kui and Zhou Xuan are with super-girls. Hollywood film toys and Divas of the Beijing opera play together. Besides the time displacement and a created simultaneous existence, the younger generation is floating in the sky, enjoying a hyper-real space.

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