Zhou Shaohua (born in 1929 in Shandong) is a well-known Chinese painter and art critic. He completed his art studies in 1950 at the university. Since then he has worked and lived in Hubei, China. Zhou Shaohua is a guest professor in eight academies of art in China. He has put on more than eighty solo exhibitions all over the world.

Zhou Shaohua works primarily in traditional Chinese pen-and-ink painting. He is an unparalleled artist who has found his own individual style. He focuses on the transformation of Chinese pen-and-ink painting evolving from the traditional to the modern form.

Zhou Schaohua applies European painting techniques to Chinese painting. He links Chinese point-line technique to Western surface-area technique, Chinese black ink to the Western concept of colour, the Chinese pictorial structure to Western ideas of composition. We see in his work a blend of Chinese and Western art. Critics in the West call his style “new Oriental Symbolism”.

The exhibition presents a comprehensive retrospective on the artistic oeuvre of Zhou Shaohua during the last thirty years. It also shows the development of Chinese pen-and-ink painting against the new historical and social background since the 1980s and 1990s.

Special exhibition by BELL ART in the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien