The combination of new imagery and stronger visual contrasts characterizes work of the third stage of their development, from about 1993 until the present. Their celebratory feeling of freedom began to manifest itself in more cheerful and playful imagery. Rather than the stressful, distorted forms of their earlier work, there was a new feeling of liberation in many paintings of this third stage that reflects this confidence and lack of fear. Their exploration of other materials also demonstrates an easy willingness to go beyond the medium of oil painting with which they were so familiar and to play with other materials in an uninhibited way.

“Another salient characteristic of their most recent work,” Dean Sobel, curator of contemporary art at the Milwaukee Art Museum points out, “is what could be described as its silent mystery. Even the titles of their recent works — Glory and Dreaming, Dream Dialogue, Silent Moment, Silent Temperament, and Sleepwalker suggest, both literally and metaphorically, unconscious states of peace and calm, especially the magical and mysterious world of sleep and dreams. The overlapping, competing abstract forms in their paintings seem analogous to the abstract, sometimes irrational imagery of dreams.”

BREAKING THE BOUNDARIES
A new realm, sculpture, in which the Zhou Brothers had experimented since 1991, fully opened to them in Europe. A painted sculpture, Dancing Wall [Fig. bz1537], was completed during their performance following the opening exhibition at Kunsthalle in Darmstadt in 1994. The dancing figures on the enormous piece seem to represent their happiness at the new world before them. The success of this exhibition greatly encouraged the Zhou Brothers’ development in this new region of the world.
In the following years, the Zhou Brothers made many sculptural works in wood or white bronze. The bold gestures and active postures, as seen in Sun Bird 1/3, Ballet Dancer, Untitled, and Turning Point, and lively carving or modeling techniques of these works create an intensely energetic feeling.

In 1995, at the invitation of the city of Oldenburg, Germany, they created a public sculpture for the city square in conjunction with an exhibition at the Kunstverein Oldenburg. In the winter of that year, they carved thirty large wooden sculptures in their studio in Oldenburg, including City Angel exhibited at Kunstverein Rotenburg, Silent Oath shown in Art Frankfurt, Silent Romance, and Sprout. This became the most productive period for their sculptural works. For their great achievement, the brothers received an award from the Kunsthalle in Darmstadt, Germany.

Another notable project was the monumental wooden sculpture the Zhou Brothers completed in 1997 in Dorset, England, where they were giving a series of lecture at the School of Design at Putnam House. The piece entitled Solid Romance was directly carved from a twenty-five foot tall tree trunk. Its form seems to be a development from their 1995 work of the same title, but its monumental size created a completely different effect. The surface cuts on the raw wood seem to describe a struggle between the artists, as they try to manipulate the material, and the gigantic tree itself, as it holds onto its physical integrity. By cutting off the bark, the artists first reveal the core of the organism, as though ripping the bandage off a wounded body. On the other hand, they seem to have released the essence of the tree, allowing its energy to erupt from its imprisoned form. The battle was ultimately waged between destruction and creation. The work is now installed permanently in the courtyard of the Putnam House.An image called “Rose Bud” of 1996 might reflect a similar idea, but now the primitive slashes of the axe are preserved in bronze. The work “resembles an enlarged, tightly-packed flower bud. It symbolizes a state of becoming, change, readiness, transition, and a promise of eternal beauty. It is a timeless study of a timeless moment.”

An important image to appear in the brothers’ early sculptures of 1992, and later repeatedly in their painting series Life Temperament, was a dancing figure. His posture, with raised head, hands on hips, and legs spread wide, looks like a ballet or folk dancer jumping delightedly into the air and temporarily escaping the force of gravity. The Zhou Brothers seem to use this image to imagine a similar state of freedom, one approaching the latent human desire to fly.
Since 1994, these energetic and powerful sculptures, along with their new paintings, have been widely exhibited in Europe and earned a great reputation for the brothers. They created a series of sculptures called Times Square in 1996, and in the same year completed a steel sculpture for the Francis Parker School in Chicago. The following year they traveled to Beijing to cast twelve life-sized bronze sculptures at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. They have held more than fifty solo exhibitions in Germany, England, Hungary, Switzerland, Netherlands, Austria, and Russia, besides more than twenty shows in the United States.

Woodblock prints were used in China for many secular purposes, as well. By the 1930s, under the impact of European modernism and social movements, the modernist print was introduced to China. The power of German expressionist examples, particularly the work of Kathe Kollwitz, inspired Chinese print-makers to leave behind the refined forms of Chinese block carving as well as their native water-based ink and take up the bold forms and oil-based printing inks of Europe. The expressionist woodcut became the rallying cry of the youth movement in 1930s China, the voice of the Communist party in the 1940s, and the sound of the party’s power in the 1960s and 1970s. As young artists in China, in fact, the Zhou Brothers would have been very familiar with the woodcut portraits of Mao Zedong that flooded the nation, and which for many Chinese became the closest thing to a religious icon in the difficult years of the Cultural Revolution. The spiritual power of the woodcut is something that first comes to mind in viewing the work of the Zhou Brothers. However, the Zhou Brothers foray into block carving is related less to the grand tradition of woodblock printing in China and much more to their own unique approach to their art and their heritage. Their blocks are carved so roughly that the finished prints appear to be crude stone rubbings. As in their oil paintings, the smoothness possible in the wood-carving medium is transformed into the primitive roughness of rock. Indeed, when printed, the shallow carving and etching on their wooden blocks create the appearance not of the printing technique that is actually used but instead of the ink squeeze rubbing technique used by archaeologists and antiquarians to reproduce the rough surfaces of ancient stone pictorial reliefs.

The same expressive dancing figure that emerged in painting and sculpture in this period is found also in prints like Group Dance, Group Figure, and Into the Field, all of 1994. “From crude, carved wooden plates, they have created a diary of life experience: figurative symbols with open arms endlessly confront the human condition,” wrote Nancy Fewkes in 1995. “The print Life Temptation of 1992, for example, presents one of their common motifs, a primitive figure with arms fully open, running through space in a gesture of encounter. Even the physical process involved in making the woodcut–gouging out a solid block–suggests the unearthing and excavating from the collective unconscious a path to the gradual discovery of an image. The expressionistic aesthetic of this art form infuses an irregular human quality into the simplified forms of the Zhous’ graphic vocabulary. Their rough alphabet of markings, inspired by the symbols of ancient cave paintings and historic letter-making, grounds itself in a palette of earth and sky colors.”

In 1990, the Zhou Brothers purchased a building for use as their studio, gallery, and home that had previously been used as the Polish Social Club in Chicago. When they cleaned the office, they found many elegant old account and ledger books. That they were filled with elegant long-hand writing in Polish and careful entries for expenses made fifty years before was no impediment–they began using the ledgers as sketchbooks.

The reuse of paper has a long tradition in China. Archaeologists have discovered Tang dynasty documents that had later been cut to use as the soles for shoes. During the Cultural Revolution, many hand-written revolutionary posters (“Big-character posters” or “Dazibao”) were inscribed on old newspapers. The idea of adding new words or images to the surface of an unrelated text was a natural one for the Zhou Brothers. The Chinese-American calligrapher C.C. Wang developed his art for many years by filling discarded New York telephone directories with his elegant brush writing. In the case of the Zhou Brothers themselves, Da Huang practiced his calligraphy as a child on old newspapers.

Now, however, the linguistic function of the ink inscribed on the pages of the Polish ledger books was completely lost to them. What was intriguing was the strong contrast between the careful ink lines of the accountant’s hand, which served as a patterned background of fine abstract motifs, and the bold colors and symbols of their own artistic language. Two typical examples are untitled drawings from 1992 and 1995.
Some of the other drawings by the Zhou Brothers use fluent abstract lines that evoke their early training in Chinese calligraphy. The variations in tonality and the rhythm of their lines very directly convey their artistic character and emotions at the moment of creation. “Spirit resonance” is the first of the Six Laws of painting formulated in China’s Six Dynasties period by scholar and art critic Xie He. Although acknowledging the spiritual expression possible through the painted form, Xie He’s words were transformed by later Chinese critics into a recognition of the spiritual power of the inscribed line. The Zhou Brothers’ calligraphic lines, with their rhythm and suggestive symbols and images, create a harmony in keeping with this aesthetic ideal.

As Fred Camper described their drawings in 1996, “Throughout the Zhou Brothers’ work, forms that are naturally opposed seem to collide at first, but not ultimately to contrast; the shape and lines …are entwined in a kind of perpetual dance that retains their separate identity but somehow marries them as well. Similarly, a line or a shape may work in two apparently opposing ways at once: It can suggest calligraphy and also pure rhythm; suggest a human or animal figure (or both) while at the same time function as a plastic, abstract form. The viewer experiences these oppositions less as separated suggestions mediated by the picture’s forms than as disparate interpretations that derive from an already unified skein of lines and shapes.”
Performance art also became a very important part of the Zhou Brothers’ art. They seem to have very naturally mastered this form, an ease that perhaps may be attributed to their early careers in theatrical performance. They enjoy working on stage. They like to communicate with an audience in a public space. And they are very good at this form of artistic communication.

From May 13 to May 15, 1994, the Zhou Brothers undertook a huge performance art project to celebrate the Fifteenth Anniversary of the Chicago International Art Exposition. They were invited to make a large installation which they called Wind Wisdom, which they executed at the east end of the Chicago Navy Pier.

The project started on May 10 with fellow artist and collaborator Mathias Wolf installing fifteen sails on the flagpoles at the pier. Originally the brothers planned to put a massive 26,000 square foot canvas on the ground, but finally decided to expand the work to 32,000 square feet, thereby covering all the pedestrian space, and encouraging visitors to walk on the artwork itself. The project formally began at noon on May 13, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, after which the Zhou Brothers started painting with huge brushes in their normal style. They first rendered some symbolic signs and abstract lines and then invited the guests to join them by expressing themselves on the canvas.

Over the course of the following three days, more than a thousand people participated in this painting / performance / installation project. Many interesting images, signs, patterns, and motifs, coming from all different cultural backgrounds, were presented on this huge canvas. Some beautiful sentiments were left on the surface of the canvas by participants, including fragments of songs and slogans: “You are my sunshine,” “Art is never ugly.” To the Zhou Brothers, modern art has no limits and no boundaries. Imagination, in any form, can be expressed in art. For this performance/installation they seized upon Chicago’s wind, a part of everyday life in the city, but now relocated as a central actor in their work of art. The Chicago wind, although ever-present, to them seems like a beckoning call to all Chicago people. The city, always filled with wind, is also a city by the water, water whose surface is constantly stirred by the wind. To the Zhou Brothers, the wind became a medium through which they could channel the spiritual energies of their fellow Chicagoans. Thus the wind’s call beckons, the waves come crashing in response, the sails fill, and the wisdom of the people is carried forth onto the canvas of this work. The wind lifts art to another realm.

In the years following, they gave many successful painting performances in different countries, including in 1995 in Portland, Oregon; in 1996 during their tenure at Pentiment at the School for Art and Design in Hamburg, Germany; in 1997 at the Nahan Gallery in New York; in 1998 they created “Life as Music” at Salzburg, Austria, and also performed in 2002 at Galerie Rackey in Bad Honnef, Germany, and at Santa Barbara, California; and in 2003 in Philadelphia. The most prestigious painting performance was held at Davos, Switzerland, in 2000. They were invited to perform at the opening reception of the World Economic Forum, which was attended by world leaders in politics, economics, and culture. Following the theme of the conference, they painted on stage their work called New Beginning, a huge canvas more than nine and a half feet high and twenty-five and a half feet long. Audiences have long been curious how the Zhou Brothers actually paint with two minds but a single vision. Watching the physical process, which is like a dance, reveals their perfect harmony at the moment of creation, but still does not explain the mystery of how they silently communicate. Although they left behind the land that had inspired their dreams, the Zhou Brothers have gradually been able to transplant these hopes to the soil of their new world. In 1986, they had just set up their research institute in Guangxi, but were unable to establish a school before their emigration. A decade later, however, they began teaching in the West.

In 1996, the brothers accepted an invitation to teach at the International Academy of Art and Design in Hamburg, Germany. Since 1998, they have taught summer classes in painting and drawing at the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg, Austria under the title, “Feeling is Liberty.” This topic, essential to the Zhou Brothers’ concept of art, seems particularly appropriate to this international setting. The Salzburg class enrolls as many as forty students from different countries, speaking various languages, and of all ages and backgrounds.

In a 2001 interview with Barbara Wally, the brothers discussed some of their ideas. Shan Zuo told her, “ …in Salzburg, we want to forget about traditional academic training…
We want the students to be very free in their minds, and develop what they have brought inside. We try to create an environment in which they can discuss their ideas and learn from each other — creative energy is the most important part of the class…”

“Art is not like any other kind of work where you just follow the rules and then get to an end. Art is feeling and ideas. No artist can sit down without any idea or feeling, and just start working.” Da Huang more directly explained their primary principle, “Without feeling there is no art…you have to use true emotion to express yourself, your feeling, the truth…”

In 2003, they set up a permanent space for the Zhou Brothers Art Foundation, which was established in 1991. Since then, they have used the space to host visiting artists and organize exhibitions and other artistic activities. This year, the brothers purchased an 85,000 square foot warehouse building in Chicago to establish the ZhouB International Institute of Art. Their dream of establishing a school when they were in Nanning will become a reality in Chicago.

More recently, the Brothers began planning a major sculptural monument for the Beijing 2008 Olympics. This ambitious project, named Timegate, demonstrates their ability to express their concepts in a wide range of artistic forms. The extremely large-scale design would serve as a landmark, a work of sculptural architecture that will be visible throughout the Olympic village.

NEW BEGINNINGS
At the beginning of the new millennium, the Zhou Brothers started a new series, diptychs called “Open My Door” which combine painting, printing, sculpture, all the techniques they have explored in previous years. The complete interchangeability of medium and technique as tools in their expressive vocabulary speaks to a new stage in the Zhou Brothers’ work, indicating they have reached a certain point of conceptual and technical maturity. Works in the series are mixed media wall pieces, many of them comparatively small, and each one comprised of two complementary sections hung side by side, as though one. In each, the ground of the adjoining sections is in strong contrast: one half lead, the other half transparent silk. Lines, geometric shapes, symbols, and figural forms are painted, stamped, molded, or printed on the ground.
As Da Huang articulated in an interview with Barbara Wally: “… ‘Open My Door’ is a new page for another era… The 21st century is a different time — so the work has to be different. The philosophy of the new series emphasizes purity and contrast. It is about now and the future, yin and yang, past and future. We still have the same kind of philosophy of creating, but a different approach. Whatever medium, it is always speaking… The harsh metal and the soft silk make each other beautiful. We put the two media together and give them new life…”

Shan Zuo described in more detail the way he saw the contrasts in “Open My Door”: “…Now, choos¬ing different kinds of materials and juxtaposing two opposite materials, our works provoke primarily strong tension, but also a wider range of expression: the monochrome lead part has harder structures-like engravings of almost primitive signs. The colourful silk part is very delicate, more soft and more transparent than any canvas painting could have been. You even can look through the silk layer, see different lights and will find some image, some hidden language under the sur¬face. It is like looking into a foggy and dense space and trying to see something, but you cannot see exactly what is there.” Da Huang also told this story: “The change in our work was also inspired by a strange experience last winter. One morning I got up and wanted to go out. The entrance door of our house in Chicago is at the end of a long corridor, and has two wings. One wing is always closed and one wing opens to go in and out. That morning I opened the door and out¬side it was white and silently snowing. Everything was white and because of the snow you could not see very much. But I could see the movement of the snowfall and behind I could see the wall, solid and gray in the back¬ground. That somehow unreal scene, that dreamlike experience entered into my dreams and my imagination. I don’t know if this event is indeed connected with the new series “Open My Door” but this moment has become a permanent image in my fantasy.”

What might be the meaning of “Open My Door” as a series title? From a practical point of view, its ambiguity leads to countless attempts at explanation and interpretation, all of them useful but none of them conclusive. Barbara Wally suggested that open my door might actually represent an opening of the mind. Alexa Oleson has suggested that the dualities in “Open My Door” reflect “experienced knowledge of a shared life.” Certainly, both the brothers’ statements and the works themselves imply that the term “open my door” suggests for the first time, outside their performance art, that a partial exposure of the process of artistic collaboration between the two brothers might be visible to the audience. Communication between two hands and dialogue between two minds is more visible than ever before.

DIALOGUE OF MINDS
The one question that is always raised about the Zhou Brothers, beginning with their first joint work in 1973, is how do the two brothers collaborate? What does collaboration mean to them? And how do we read these two different minds through their unique collaborative work?

Collaboration between two artists is not completely unusual. In the modern Western art world, there are some prominent examples of artists working in pairs. Even in the field of contemporary Chinese art, other fraternal teams have emerged in recent years, including the three Luo brothers and the two Gao brothers. But the extraordinary continuity of their collaboration over thirty years, and the highly expressive modernist brushwork of their painting, makes their collaboration very unusual.

Dean Sobel has observed their collaboration quite acutely:
The brothers’ working methods have not changed significantly since their first collaboration in 1973. By the late 1980s, they found a way to fuse their energies into a seamless process… Their collaboration is never marked by extensive preparations or discussions. In fact, they rarely talk about art in the studio; such talk usually takes place while they are traveling or on walks. Instead, the brothers work side-by side, silently… navigating around each other and their canvas… which, for their larger works, is usually placed on the floor. Although they typically work simultaneously, they are often working on different parts of a painting (and usually on more than one at a time). At any point during the execution of a work, one brother may overpaint or add markings to the sections the other brother has made, with no discussion as to why it needs reworking or what effect is being sought. The element of chance is essential, especially in their more recent work.

Their unique collaboration follows recent, post-modern debates concerning the “great person theories” of modernism. [Fig. bz4075] While modernism emphasized stylistic individuality and linear development, post-modernism has resulted in a profusion of artistic collaborations. The Zhou Brothers’ working process is more personal and intimate than the methods of many other twentieth-century collectives, ranging from the loosely-connected Dada and Futurist movements to the many recent dual artist-partnerships, such as those of Gilbert & George, Hilla and Bernd Becher, and Komar and Melamid. The brothers’ common background perhaps explains the highly instinctive approach they share — the way in which they relate to each other while working (usually non-verbally, relying essentially on intuition) seems analogous to the special communication twins often demonstrate. Da Huang has remarked, “Sometimes when I start my brother isn’t even home. When he comes back he doesn’t need to ask me about what I’m doing. He knows what is going to develop.” …No distinct style, technique, or color preference distinguishes one brother’s work from the other’s. Issues of individual contribution, division of labor, or “who made which mark”…are irrelevant to the Zhou Brothers. Often they cannot remember which of them made which mark. It’s as if they have become one artist.

At least one critic has quite directly suggested that the bifurcated compositions of the Open My Door series reflect not only “the dicotomies of the self” but in some way also their lives together, how, as “different as they may be, [they] become grafted to one another, become similar, and grow around one another, consciously leaving space for the partner to breath and express himself.”

As we have seen, the Open my Door series exposes visually the dialogue between the two artists in a way not previously exposed by their work itself. At the same time, with the advent of the new millennium, the two brothers themselves began to speak more openly about their collaborative process, exposing at least a small corner of their inner lives to their public. What the brothers themselves have said may be the best way of beginning to approach this unfathomable creative relationship.

“Painting is about feeling, not about story only,” explained Da Huang in 1989. “We share a very excited (energized, dynamic) feeling about life, about sex, about dying. We feel excitement about everything. The painting may look very simple visually, but it is more. It is an act of meditation—perhaps on the energy of the village, on hope, on the hopes of the earth. Hope through history gives many people energy…When we see an empty canvas, the image will become a New World. But what kind of New World? We have only an excited feeling. Our feeling is expressed on the canvas…” As Shan Zuo added, “Now the world is many different things together. Good/bad, happy/sad. One painting alone is one world. Painting together makes each painting a whole new world.”
“We both have the same childhood dream of art,” says Shan Zuo. “ We are always looking to expand on that something which is more important than anything else. And secondly, we have this chemistry which allows us to continue to respect and love each other almost like lovers. We value each other above all material things. In the end, we love each other, we play and create and enjoy many things in life…” “Art is part of our joy of life,” echoes Da Huang. “And our art is like a musical performance.”

“We are two artists, but we create together,” Da Huang said in 2001. “I always respect my brother’s talent — not just his painting or sculpture, but also his knowledge and philosophy of life. We try to put the best of each of us into the piece — that is what collaboration is about. In our personalities we have many things in common, but also many things are different. Our collaboration has continued for almost three decades now. During that time we have gone through different collaboration stages, but today we realize that we can work together, and nevertheless each keeps his own personality and point of view — but we put it together in one unique piece. That is unique — that is the value of our col¬laboration… While we are painting we never talk about art. We talk about our projects together, our experi¬ences — but not about the painting specifically. It is more of a private dialogue.”

Shan Zuo added: “When artists create a painting, most of them understand their relation to their painting as a dialogue with the canvas. The collaboration is a dialogue, and the canvas serves just to record it. In the new works we use lead and silk, but it could also be wood or any other medium-they simply record the dialogue… I like to talk to my brother, I have a dialogue with him and at the same time I express something on the canvas. Sometimes, when I am by myself, I even talk to myself, but I prefer to talk with my brother when I am painting on canvas. So we create a sort of triangle — it is three-dimensional and we like that idea. We think that we create something that you don’t expect. We don’t have a plan before we paint — we just decide on the size and the medium. We communicate through the painting language — on the canvas; it is not English or German, ¬it is just art language.”

Thirty years, three decades, even longer than Mao Zedong ruled the people of China. The world has dramatically changed since the Zhou Brothers began working together. Mao died, the Cold War ended, Germany reunited, the world was transformed by the Information Technology Revolution. Anything can happen in thirty years. But the collaboration between the Zhou Brothershas almost miraculously become closer as the years have passed. At the same time, they have become increasingly comfortable talking about their differences. They often tell people that their work is the product of a dream dialogue. For dialogue, you must have commonalities, but dialogue also implies areas of disagreement, possibly even intense disputes, that must be discussed. Indeed, the brothers often have very strongly held differences in opinion about certain artistic concepts and ideas. All of these are solved or expressed, however, in their artworks.

As Da Huang revealed, “Some paintings come out very smoothly, look very nice, fresh, and relaxed. Some pieces take a long time, and you can see the difficulty in the work. Much earlier we always tried to make. . . the ideas from the collaboration fit better. But after some years we realized it’s not necessary to fit them together. You have to fight together; that’s the value of collaboration.”

From Huashan to Shanghai to Beijing. Nanning to Chicago to New York to Oldenburg. From Portland to Bern to Davos. The thirty-year artistic career of the Zhou Brothers passed through many highs
and lows. They left China at the peak of their artistic success in their motherland to start again with nothing in the New World. The second half of their thirty-year career proved that they made the right decision to seek artistic freedom abroad.

When they arrived in the United States, the Zhou brothers faced an unpredictable future. Almost twenty years later, their artistic achievements are widely recognized internationally. They are among the most prominent artists in the world. With their strong roots in traditional Chinese culture, they absorbed Western modernist
and post-modernist concepts, developing their own unique artistic language and creative technique. They have wandered freely among different materials, media, formats, and expressive techniques, but it seems that the gusting Chicago winds continue to blow them into the next, unexplored realm. Energy, courage, open-mindedness, commitment, and perseverance, so necessary for any good artist, are all traits that the Zhou Brothers possess, but most important are their enormous and ever-changing artistic dreams. At beginning of the new millennium, the Zhou Brothers have taken their next steps on the journey of dreams.