Exhibition showcases stark beauty of polar landscapes

Space and Gallery Association Shanghai is presenting “Polar Solitude” — a solo painting exhibition by Zhao Bo.

It showcases Zhao’s recent large-scale works, predominantly created since 2023. It offers a glimpse into his evolving artistic journey in pursuit of epic grandeur and an aesthetic of sublimity, while capturing his exploration of how the digital age shapes the postmodern social landscape.

In 2011, Zhao embarked on a journey to Norway. His studies at Oslo National Academy of the Arts profoundly influenced his artistic vision, sparking a renewed awareness of his north-eastern Chinese roots. While immersed in Norway’s stark beauty, Zhao began to view his homeland through a new lens, realizing that the true “polar region” for him was in north-eastern China itself.

His work from then on began to evoke scenes that blend both northern European and north-eastern Chinese landscapes, capturing a vision of an imagined northern world — a “future polar region” that transcends cultural boundaries.

The exhibition space feels like a vast frozen wilderness, cold and profound.

Large-scale paintings depicting snowbound landscapes line the walls, exuding a sense of quiet power and chilling tranquility. Zhao’s compositions stretch across the canvas, capturing expansive snowfields and towering mountains that draw viewers into a boundless northern realm, evoking a grand and solitary atmosphere.

In the center of the gallery, the monumental painting “Lonesome Boat No.17” transports viewers into a snow-covered dreamscape.

The vast winter forest stands quietly beneath a starlit sky, its branches laden with snow, each twig glistening with a faint, cold sheen in the soft starlight.

The sky, deep and boundless, is dense with stars — perhaps they are stardust, or maybe drifting snowflakes — blending into a hazy poetry that blurs the line between reality and dream.

In the midst of this tranquil world, two small yellow kayaks float in solitude. Their bright color stands in stark contrast yet is embedded deeply in the icy landscape, as if it’s conveying a story of lonely fate.

The kayak, unlike a traditional Chinese boat, is an industrial product adrift in an uninhabited wilderness, symbolizing the solitary journey of modern life. From birth, each person is cast into this vast, indifferent world, destined to face the trials of life alone.

In the distance, a faint pyramid looms, standing silently at the far reaches of the scene. It probably represents the structures of power and authority within society, stable yet immense, like an insurmountable mountain — distant and unyielding. Viewers can see it but cannot reach it, evoking a sense of unattainable pressure.

The spruce-covered, snow-laden landscapes — a common sight in both Northern Europe and north-east China —- become recurring motifs in Zhao’s work.

Spruces, which thrive in cold climates, symbolize resilience and sacredness, enduring in his imagination as stalwart figures that remain standing no matter what befalls the world.

In Zhao’s envisioned “polar region,” these spruces are the last symbols standing in a world either as we know it or in a future yet to come.

The painting “The End of the World No.2” presents a striking, surreal scene of an iceberg floating in a dark, frozen sea.

On this precarious iceberg stands a lone camel, an animal typically associated with deserts, casting an immediate sense of dissonance. This choice reflects the artist’s cultural and philosophical considerations, bringing together two contrasting worlds: the frozen polar landscape and the arid desert.

The image suggests a precarious balance — a juxtaposition of the stable and unstable, the expected and unexpected.

The iceberg itself appears fragile, almost as if it could break apart at any moment, intensifying the tension within the composition.

The camel, stranded in this unlikely place, embodies an unsettling uncertainty, caught between the firm solidity of the desert and the ephemeral nature of ice. This combination evokes a feeling of suspended reality, a reflection on the fluidity and fragility of our world.

If you go:

Date: Through November 30

Address: 3/F, 3 Zhongshan Rd E1

Admission: Free