Zhang is a mild-mannered, somewhat cosmopolitan figure who produces avant-garde art of great vitality. His work reflects his traditional upbringing in a cultured family in the early days of New China, his experiences during the Cultural Revolution and the inspiration that he has gained from the time he spends in Australia.

 

……Zhang had produced Volume (Ce), which has been highly praised by several critics as one of the seminal works of the early period of the Modernist movement. The composition is inspired by the ancient pictograms that reflect the nature of the earliest Chinese volumes of written material. These were comprised of wooden or bamboo strips on which characters were written before the strips were sewn together side-by-side and could then be rolled up for storage. Zhang’s great achievement was to rework the structure of the character Ce and use the tonalities of his ink to make it seem as if this ancient volume is being unrolled before our very eyes. It was in this work that Zhang first made characters look like three-dimensional sculptures, an effect that was to become one of the hallmarks of his work.

 

….In his calligraphy Zhang has been attracted to both the delicacy and the strength of expression that can be conveyed through a brush. …His works in this style are characterised by the use of lines done in what is called ‘flying white’, an effect created as the hairs of a drying brush that is moving fairly rapidly separate, and in doing so leave white lines within a brush stroke. It is a technique that calls for strict discipline and an intuitive response in creating new forms.

 

…As pleased as Zhang was with the pieces he was producing in this style, he still felt that he would have to be more dramatic if he were to be able to depict other images that were surging in his mind. He began to use denser ink, sometimes enriched with colour, together with a fast-moving brush in order to create the sensation of flight -- in other words, to make the image seems vivid enough to fly off the paper.

 

…‘Dawo Black in White Miaomo’ refers to the ancient art form which Ke Wenhui, a Beijing art critic, has aptly described as combining the brush strokes and lines of Chinese calligraphy and painting with the flowing rhythms of dance and the charming tones of music. …The art of Miaomo, Zhang says, is a way for man to commune with Nature, and through so doing commune with his own feelings. The forms are abstract and without colour, though Chinese ink itself produces black in such different tones that they are like colours. The artist executes his work in one single movement, without the use of any secondary strokes or even touching up. The aim is to be “as natural as the wind blowing over water or the clouds gliding over mountains.” …In other works Zhang seeks to remind people of the links between traditional calligraphy and the modern expression of that tradition.

 

…The above mentioned pieces -- those done both in ‘flying white’ and solid black -- are unquestionably Chinese in feel. The form, the materials and the texture all immediately draw the viewer into appreciating the pleasures of Chinese calligraphy and Chinese culture. At the same time, their freshness and dynamic abstract forms appeal to many Westerners. As Zhang Zhaohui, from the China Visual Arts Research Institute in Beijing, put it in 1996: “Viewers might sense in Zhang’s works a profound combination of spirits and artistic practices from both East and West which go beyond the boundaries of nationality, race and culture towards the purity and essence of art itself”

 

....In China in his forties, Zhang had already shown that he was a highly imaginative and expressive artist. Through his contact with Australia in his fifties his work gained the added vitality that he sought in order to make it ‘fly off the paper’. At the same time, he has played a leading part in introducing into China the ideas of Western abstract expressionism.