The Zhou Brothers left for Chicago via Shanghai on November 7, 1986, with thirty dollars in their pockets and fifty paintings in their suitcase. They were not able to reach the U.S. in time for the group show, but arrived before the November opening of their first solo show at East-West Gallery. The show attracted quite a lot of attention, but did not sell a single painting. The people who came seemed to like their works, but because no one knew who the Zhou Brothers were, they hesitated to purchase their paintings.

During the period of the exhibition, the gallery was responsible for hosting them in Chicago, but at the conclusion of the exhibition, with no paintings sold, they had no source of income and nowhere to go. The gallery owner was very kind and supportive, however, and rented an apartment for them at his own expense.

Although there were hundreds of Chinese artists in the U.S. by the time the Zhou Brothers arrived, their situations for the most part were discouraging. Very few were able to support themselves as artists, and most who did were forced to turn to illegally painting portraits on the street or to piecework design of textile patterns as means of making a living. A handful of exceptions could be found, most of whom made paintings of beautiful Chinese women in exotic garb. Thus, the obvious options before the Zhou Brothers all suggested that they could not maintain their artistic vision and survive in the West. Some Chinese artists who had lived in the States for a few years came and gave well-meaning advice to the brothers, advising that they could only make a living if they changed to a much more commercially appealing style. The two most financially successful Chinese artists in the U.S. at that time became prosperous by painting exotic images of minority women, a somewhat commercialized version of Yuan Yunsheng’s airport mural style, which they sold as limited edition prints through the decorator market. The pressure on the Zhou Brothers to follow this example must have been enormous. One of these artists, in fact, advised the Zhou Brothers that they were painting for museums, not for collectors, but that since they were unknown in the West no museum would collect their work. They were urged by most people they met to change their way of painting to suit the American market. The Zhou Brothers, however, were confident despite all that they could succeed.

In preparation for their move to the United States, the Zhou Brothers determined to establish a new identity for their new lives. They each selected a new name. Shaoli became Shan Zuo and Shaoning became Da Huang. For their first show in Chicago they began using their new names. The main thing that changed immediately for the Zhou Brothers after they went abroad was that they no longer suffered from political pressure and could concentrate entirely on art. For the first time they had complete freedom to develop their own artistic vocabulary, style, and imagery, with no worry about adverse consequences. The work they produced in the second half of their artistic career proves without question that the brothers made the right decision when they accepted the risks of leaving their native land.

In the absence of exotic locales and unpredictable political dangers, the most recent fifteen years, the second half of the Zhou Brothers’ career, does not make such a colorful narrative, but even so the process of achieving their reputation in the international art world passed through several dramatic stages. Although no paintings in the December 1986 show were sold, the exhibition attracted the attention of the Chicago art world. The main pieces exhibited in the show were paintings they brought from China. Two large-scale mural painting drafts especially attracted attention. Two sections of the four-part Huashan Mural Series, A Cradle of the Greens and Song of Life, which had been well-received when exhibited in China, also appealed to Chicago audiences. Margaret Hawkins, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times characterized them as follows: “The best pieces in the show…are two mural-like [paintings] exactly five times wider than they are tall. “The Cradle of the Greens” is a joyous tribute to fecundity; dense with acrobats, beasts, birds and lush plant life. A totemlike figure appears at the center of what seems to be a festival of life…The whole thing is a pattern of ritual celebration that owes nothing to Renaissance perspective or the Western tendency toward narrative…

The color range is controlled yet as evocative within its limits as the neutral palette of Rembrandt… “The Song of Life” is a similar [painting] full of warriors, horses, musicians, bathers and dancing women.”

ARCHETYPE TO IMAGE
The positive response from the Chicago art world, despite the exhibition’s lack of financial success, gave the Zhou Brothers confidence to continue on their own path. With the support of their gallery, the brothers continued to work hard, painting day and night to make new work for their next show. During the following year, they caught every chance to participate in shows. In July of 1987, they held their fifth show at the East-West Contemporary Art Gallery. In this show, they exhibited new paintings based on their Huashan sketches.

In one new painting, Song of the Ming River, the brothers depicted two dark figures making their way along the river in an ancient boat. Although this figurative image appears repeatedly in their paintings, on this occasion Shan Zuo told a story. In the Zhuang mythology it is said that the world was destroyed by fire. “Only a brother and sister survived. Since they were siblings, they could not marry, so they separated, each following the river in a different direction to search for the sun. Many years later they met, but because they had not seen each other for a long time, they had forgotten that they were brother and sister. They married and had many children, and the earth became full again.” People who read the painting might see the shadow of the two brothers dancing by the river, excited by their ancestors’ great artistic creation and their rich and colorful lives.

Many of the brothers’ paintings give us the impression that they retain a close spiritual involvement with their dreams. The fantastic horse depicted in a work called Pastoral suggests that their dream was to transcend their old world as they leap into a new world. Da Huang said at that time, ““We are always looking for the hope, the wish, the dream…We are always searching for the sun. This time a sign of success finally descended upon them. The show brought many good reviews and positive public response. Chicago’s TV 7 introduced their work in the program “What’s Happening in Chicago.” CBS conducted a broadcast interview with them on stage beside Lake Michigan during the annual “Taste of Chicago” festival. This was the first time that they became widely known within the Chicago art world and by the Chicago public. Other media, including Voice of America, interviewed them at that time. They were very encouraged by this positive response and created a new mural-sized creation entitled Dream of Chicago. [Fig. 36]

The following year, 1988, saw several exhibitions in Chicago. A fifteen-piece series, Spirit of the Earth, was shown at the Chicago Cultural Center. At the C.G. Jung Institute in Evanston, Illinois, they exhibited their work and conducted their first public workshop, “Primitive Symbolism and the Modern Art World.” Beginning in 1989, their exhibition schedule became increasingly busy. In a major 1989 effort, Feingarten Galleries, based in Los Angeles, presented their work in both New York and Los Angeles. In collaboration with East West Contemporary Art, Feingarten published the Zhou Brothers’ first English-language catalogue. They also showed in both university and commercial galleries in Florida, Indiana, California, Massachusetts, and New York, including Smith College Art Museum in Northhampton, Massachusetts. They also showed for the first time in Taipei. They purchased a studio building in the Bridgeport area of Chicago at that time, making it possible to begin hosting visiting artists. Their dream in China of bringing artists together in a collaborative creation studio became possible, requiring only their own initiative and generosity.

Throughout the early nineties they further expanded their audiences, showing their work to good reviews in a wide range of venues, including Paris, London, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Cologne, Madrid, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, as well as continuing to exhibit in American cities – Chicago; New York; Los Angeles; Portland; Dubuque; Miami; and Houston. They were happy that in 1990 their first major large-scale painting made in Chicago, Dream of Chicago [Fig. 36], along with Life Symphony, which was inspired by a catastrophic fire in Chicago’s gallery district in 1989, were acquired for permanent public display at the Mid Continental Plaza at 55 E. Monroe in their adopted home of Chicago. By that time, they had been living in Chicago for several years. Shan Zuo and Da Huang had devised a visual vocabulary that expressed their faith in the lasting value of the ancient forms, but in an artistic language that matured through their thorough study of the European modernist canon. The environment in Chicago, with its great museums and wealth of Surrealist paintings, helped them develop quickly. The calligraphic fantasy of Miro and the pseudo-primitivism of Jean Dubuffet, so well represented in Chicago collections, provided the visual nourishment.

Their work in this period, however, continued to draw heavily on the strengths of their training and experience in China. Much of their art was still conceived in the monumental scale suited to mural painting. That the brothers are so good at creating a dramatic and all-encompassing environment is based upon their early training as stage set designers. For them at this time, working on an enormous canvas was completely natural. Large-scale mural paintings, just like three-dimensional stage designs, created a space for the free exercise of their imaginations. A similar mastery of theatrical effects may also be seen in the work of their fellow graduate of the Shanghai Drama Academy, Cai Guoqiang, who has been active in Japan and the United States since the 1990s.

Peter Clothier analyzed the brothers’ painting of this period in 1989 article:
In the Zhou Brothers’ paintings, signs speak to us with the resonance of archetype and myth, but also, inevitably, in the language of art history. Even for those of us for whom Chinese traditions remain remote, the central image of the figure in the boat in Golden Journey, for example, recalls the meandering narrative that leads our eyes through a scroll painting, set against moody, evocative landscapes. In the background, the glittering gold establishes a different but related context—a decorative tradition of screens and textual illuminations, which acts as a foil to the scratched calligraphy and the bold, gestural black forms. Such repeated references establish the work firmly in the tradition of the brothers’ native culture in our minds—though surely in ways more subtle and complex than the Western-educated mind needs to exhaust. For the imaginative viewer, Picasso is here, with the powerful, primal energies of his fascination with the bull in, say, Energy Portrait, and his “primitive” reduction and sometimes playful distortion of natural beauty in human and animal forms.

So, of course, is Miró, with the fantasy of his lines and the dance he creates between simple forms and colors (black, white, red), as well as his love of the rough, textured surface. The expressive language of the abstract expressionists is quoted freely, in broad, gestural movements that activate the surface of these canvases.
The rich interweaving of historical context is another part, then, of the Zhou Brothers’ journey and creates a valuable intellectual basis for our approach. The ultimate journey, however, is the experience of the paintings themselves, for they work as maps of consciousness that suggest alternative routes for the observing eye. Even as the strong, predominating images act on us, the carefully worked surfaces take us back through successive layers of pigment. Most frequently these are accretions of each colors, superimposed and scraped away, or scratched, whether by chance or by intention, sometimes seemingly as far as the ten thousand years that separate us from those original cliff paintings.

Chicago art world and by the Chicago public. Other media, including Voice of America, interviewed them at that time. They were very encouraged by this positive response and created a new mural-sized creation entitled Dream of Chicago. [Fig. 36]

The following year, 1988, saw several exhibitions in Chicago. A fifteen-piece series, Spirit of the Earth, was shown at the Chicago Cultural Center. At the C.G. Jung Institute in Evanston, Illinois, they exhibited their work and conducted their first public workshop, “Primitive Symbolism and the Modern Art World.” Beginning in 1989, their exhibition schedule became increasingly busy. In a major 1989 effort, Feingarten Galleries, based in Los Angeles, presented their work in both New York and Los Angeles. In collaboration with East West Contemporary Art, Feingarten published the Zhou Brothers’ first English-language catalogue. They also showed in both university and commercial galleries in Florida, Indiana, California, Massachusetts, and New York, including Smith College Art Museum in Northhampton, Massachusetts. They also showed for the first time in Taipei. They purchased a studio building in the Bridgeport area of Chicago at that time, making it possible to begin hosting visiting artists. Their dream in China of bringing artists together in a collaborative creation studio became possible, requiring only their own initiative and generosity.

Throughout the early nineties they further expanded their audiences, showing their work to good reviews in a wide range of venues, including Paris, London, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Cologne, Madrid, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, as well as continuing to exhibit in American cities – Chicago; New York; Los Angeles; Portland; Dubuque; Miami; and Houston. They were happy that in 1990 their first major large-scale painting made in Chicago, Dream of Chicago [Fig. 36], along with Life Symphony, which was inspired by a catastrophic fire in Chicago’s gallery district in 1989, were acquired for permanent public display at the Mid Continental Plaza at 55 E. Monroe in their adopted home of Chicago.
By that time, they had been living in Chicago for several years. Shan Zuo and Da Huang had devised a visual vocabulary that expressed their faith in the lasting value of the ancient forms, but in an artistic language that matured through their thorough study of the European modernist canon. The environment in Chicago, with its great museums and wealth of Surrealist paintings, helped them develop quickly. The calligraphic fantasy of Miro and the pseudo-primitivism of Jean Dubuffet, so well represented in Chicago collections, provided the visual nourishment.

Their work in this period, however, continued to draw heavily on the strengths of their training and experience in China. Much of their art was still conceived in the monumental scale suited to mural painting. That the brothers are so good at creating a dramatic and all-encompassing environment is based upon their early training as stage set designers. For them at this time, working on an enormous canvas was completely natural. Large-scale mural paintings, just like three-dimensional stage designs, created a space for the free exercise of their imaginations. A similar mastery of theatrical effects may also be seen in the work of their fellow graduate of the Shanghai Drama Academy, Cai Guoqiang, who has been active in Japan and the United States since the 1990s.

Peter Clothier analyzed the brothers’ painting of this period in 1989 article:
In the Zhou Brothers’ paintings, signs speak to us with the resonance of archetype and myth, but also, inevitably, in the language of art history. Even for those of us for whom Chinese traditions remain remote, the central image of the figure in the boat in Golden Journey, for example, recalls the meandering narrative that leads our eyes through a scroll painting, set against moody, evocative landscapes. In the background, the glittering gold establishes a different but related context—a decorative tradition of screens and textual illuminations, which acts as a foil to the scratched calligraphy and the bold, gestural black forms.​ Such repeated references establish the work firmly in the tradition of the brothers’ native culture in our minds—though surely in ways more subtle and complex than the Western-educated mind needs to exhaust. For the imaginative viewer, Picasso is here, with the powerful, primal energies of his fascination with the bull in, say, Energy Portrait, and his “primitive” reduction and sometimes playful distortion of natural beauty in human and animal forms.

So, of course, is Miró, with the fantasy of his lines and the dance he creates between simple forms and colors (black, white, red), as well as his love of the rough, textured surface. The expressive language of the abstract expressionists is quoted freely, in broad, gestural movements that activate the surface of these canvases.
The rich interweaving of historical context is another part, then, of the Zhou Brothers’ journey and creates a valuable intellectual basis for our approach. The ultimate journey, however, is the experience of the paintings themselves, for they work as maps of consciousness that suggest alternative routes for the observing eye. Even as the strong, predominating images act on us, the carefully worked surfaces take us back through successive layers of pigment. Most frequently these are accretions of each colors, superimposed and scraped away, or scratched, whether by chance or by intention, sometimes seemingly as far as the ten thousand years that separate us from those original cliff paintings.

The use of primitive motifs was a subtext for a modernist agenda during the years in China when the Zhou Brothers sought to establish their new style. However, after having moved to the West and becoming part of the Western art world, their relationship to the history of Western modernism became even clearer. As Gerald Nordland observed in 1993: Archaic and primitive forms have served as important influences elsewhere in modern art history. The arts of Egypt, Persia, Cambodia, and the arts of Oceanic people played a role in the development of the work of Paul Gauguin. African art was acknowledged as an inspiration by the Fauve painters of France — Henri Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck and Andre Derain. The Brucke painters of Germany — Kirchner, Heckel, Nolde, etc. — acknowledged the experience of medieval art and the African and Oceanic art, found in the museum of Dresden; incorporated this “primitivisms” into their drawings, woodcuts and paintings; Nolde visited the Pacific Islands. The Blaue Reiter group credit ed a variety of “primitive” sources for their art, including medieval, folkart, children’s art, as well as the sculpture
of Africa and Oceania. Picasso collected African art and u tilized African sculptural imagery in shaping his “African Period” and in the foundation work of cubism — Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1906-7. The Dada and Surrealist poets and painters –¬Breton, Eluard, Ernst, Lam, Miro, Masson, Matta and Tzara responded to African sculpture and even more extravagantly to that of New Guinea and New Ireland. They also placed high importance upon the work of the Northwest Coast Indians and the Pre-Columbian sculptors of Mexico and Peru. Nordland further elaborates on the essential truths of art and human existence sought by these modern artists, a mission similar to that undertaken by the Zhou Brothers in their immersion in the Huashan images.
…Gauguin recognized a dignity, order and self-directed pride in primitive art that he missed in the arts of higher civilizations. Matisse and Vlaminck found a directness and spontaneity in primitive art which they valued above the Greek tradition. The German Expressionists felt that they found in primitivism a contact with religious and magic forces of human expression, which
they preferred to the decadent formulas of Western art. Picasso was stimulated by the formal invention of African sculptors, and sensed that he could use analogous approaches in the renewal of European art. The Surrealists believed they were short-cutting presuppositions regarding the nature of art allowing improvisation and intuition to guide them, thereby reaching to the essentials of human nature as revealed in modern psychology.
Twentieth century artists have tended to read the work of archaic and primitive artists as being intertwined with the universal, as revealing the archetypal myths and beliefs of ancient civilizations and the universal psychology of the human mind. The Zhou Brothers are proud of the values and achievements of Chinese folk and primitive art and artists. They believe themselves to have been nourished by their focus on nonacademic art, which has come to embody the artist’s search for renewed spiritual meaning.
With mastery of the primitive motifs achieved, during the period between 1986 and 1993 the Zhou Brothers’ painting styles moved gradually away from work directly inspired by the Huashan cliff paintings. The earlier works in the late 1980s were still strongly influenced by the muted color tonalities of the actual ancient site, and were executed in densely mixed and sometimes subdued colors. Since 1990, however, their work became more expressive and less representational, using much stronger contrasts of pure pigment and bolder symbolic gestures. They developed a unique color symbolism in which they said, “life is black, pain is red, and hope is white.”

Although their colors and imagery became simpler and more direct, the abstraction of form and unrecognizable images created a sense of mystery. The best examples of this development may be seen in Searching the Dream of 1988, Dance with the Sun of 1989, as well as Drumming and Life Symphony, both of 1990.
At the same time, in most of these works, they began to experiment with variations of the surface texture of the paintings. Interestingly, in their earlier work, what they sought to represent was the pitted surface of the cliff, which they rendered in smooth, illusionistic oil paint. Now, although departing from the actual appearance of the cliff paintings, the surface of their work, by incorporating sand and non-traditional fabric, allowed their mixed media works to attain the rough primitive quality of the cliffs themselves. The most representative works exemplifying this new trend are Dragon Pool of 1990 and Life Temptation of 1991, and such qualities may also be seen in their monumental work Eternity. Eternity was commissioned, after an international competition, by the Hong Kong Central Plaza, then the tallest building in Asia, as their lobby decoration. It was 26 feet high by 19 feet wide, and was very powerful when hung in its expansive setting in 1991. They thus began freeing themselves from bondage to the painted surface. Over these years, the tension in their painting became more visible, but it was no longer the torment of a battle for free expression, instead it became an even more intense struggle within themselves to develop their own expressive approach. The challenge now, in the absence of all other restrictions, became a confrontation between the limits of their own ability and art itself.
As their work became less representational, it began to acquire a dream-like quality, seeming to represent the world of the subconscious. They abandoned figural motifs and relied more on brush strokes, lines, abstract symbols, and color contrasts. The impact of abstract and abstract expressionist painting on their stylistic evolution is obvious, but their entire new environment was equally important.

Released from the pressures of their lives in China, they had an unrestricted opportunity to develop their art. It was during this period that they became conscious of the unlimited potential of art, and the immense possibilities before them. The world was so much larger and more fertile than they had ever imagined in China. The unlimited freedom to do whatever they wanted to do, and the accompanying exhilaration, allowed them to go far beyond the limitations of the “oil painter” as defined by the academic art world of their youths. The brothers showed that they had the ability to express themselves not only in different terms but in different media.

Their first trip to Europe, in 1990, with visits to museums and galleries in France, England, Germany, and Spain, provided great opportunities to further understand European modernism and contemporary art. The year 1994 marked another very important step in the Zhou Brothers’ new artistic direction. That year they had their first exhibition, entitled Crossing the Street, at the Kunsthalle in Darmstadt, Germany. Spirit #7 is characteristic of the new painting exhibited. In the words of Oskar Friedl “…the canvas evokes the feeling of a portal through which a “Spirit” steps with its arms spread out wide enough to embrace all mankind. This positive gesture is reduced to only one black figure on a white canvas. The figure is in the state of becoming a person, and its powerful physical motion is rendered with a single brushstroke in the area behind the head.”

At the Kunsthalle in Darmstadt, Germany. Spirit #7 is characteristic of the new painting exhibited. In the words of Oskar Friedl “…the canvas evokes the feeling of a portal through which a “Spirit” steps with its arms spread out wide enough to embrace all mankind. This positive gesture is reduced to only one black figure on a white canvas. The figure is in the state of becoming a person, and its powerful physical motion is rendered with a single brushstroke in the area behind the head.”

The show exhibited 180 works, and traveled to Stadtmuseum in Salzgitter, Germany, and the Ludwig Museum in Budapest. The catalogue associated with this exhibition, called Zhou Brothers—Chinesische Symbiose, Vier Hande, Zwei Bruder, Ein Gemalde, was published by the Kunsthalle Darmstadt.