The Extraordinary in Ordinary Life: Zhao Xiao Dong on Painting, Memory and Human Connection

Reflections on “Magnificent Acts – A Practice for Living,” an artist talk held at M+ on 2 November 2026

On 2 November 2026, the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong’s Foundation Gallery presented Magnificent Acts – A Practice for Living, a talk by Chongqing-based painter Zhao Xiao Dong, with the support of Chao Lee Art Foundation. Following Zhao’s presentation, moderators Gao Yi and Professor Desmond Hui joined him for a conversation about realism, portraiture and the relationship between art and everyday experience.

Rather than offering a conventional account of technique, Zhao led the audience through vegetable markets, mountain paths, kitchens, classrooms and studios. His paintings, he showed, begin long before a canvas is stretched. They grow out of repeated encounters: shopping for food, sharing a meal, teaching children, climbing a mountain, or simply noticing how a person sits, works or plays.

By the end of the afternoon, a clear idea had emerged. Painting is not only a matter of representation. It is a sustained practice of paying attention to other people’s lives.

Art begins before the studio

“Art comes from life,” Zhao explained; creation does not begin only when an artist enters the studio. Observation accumulates through ordinary experiences, and small details gradually become reflections on society.

Zhao spoke about his early paintings of Chongqing and the wider Sichuan–Chongqing region. He painted the city’s bang bang—porters who carried goods up and down its steep streets—as well as motorcycle drivers, labourers, market vendors, family meals and neighbourhood hotpot gatherings. Some of these occupations have since disappeared or changed beyond recognition, but his paintings retain their rhythms, physical effort and social atmosphere.

Food became a particularly rich subject. Zhao, who described himself as an enthusiastic cook, discussed paintings of pumpkins, chillies, tofu, crabs, fish and hotpot. A visit to a market, he suggested, reveals a city’s temperature: its prices, its cost of living and the small pleasures of the people who shop there.

His food paintings are not simply still lifes. A tiny figure, a pig or even Spider-Man may unexpectedly alter the scale and introduce humour or allegory. In one painting, his own cat turns towards a plate of fish that has already been partly eaten—a scene Zhao described with the evocative title Looking Back at the Jianghu. In another, a fish and miniature figures suggest a connection between food and conflict. Everyday objects become vehicles for memory, fantasy and social observation.

From a vegetable basket to a national story

Zhao’s account of Our Vegetable Basket (《我们的菜篮子》, 2019) demonstrated how a seemingly modest subject can open onto a much larger story.

He received the commission in 2017 to respond to China’s “vegetable basket” programme, a national policy concerned with food production, supply and distribution. His first thought was simply to paint a market on a larger scale. Further research persuaded him that this would not be enough.

He visited markets across Chongqing, vegetable farms and a major wholesale market that began work at four in the morning. He learned about cultivation, transport and the labour behind the produce on display. Cucumber pickers, for example, were paid according to the weight they harvested. The familiar market stall was only the final point in a much longer chain of work and logistics.

The composition evolved through several unsuccessful approaches. Eventually, Zhao moved from merely depicting market activity to presenting a sequence that connected harvesting, wholesale distribution and retail. Colour provided the final unifying idea: green linked the produce across the canvas, while red in the human figures created a strong visual contrast. Green also carried a thematic association with safe, environmentally responsible food production.

What made the account compelling was not simply the scale of the finished painting, but Zhao’s description of the decisions required to reach it. Research changed the picture; revision gave it structure; and colour allowed a national theme to remain grounded in ordinary experience.

Liangshan: teaching, childhood and the freedom to play

A second major body of work grew from Zhao’s visits to Yi communities in Liangshan. He travelled there with students, helped establish an art library at a hope school and taught children to draw.

His memories of the school were vivid and often humorous. He recalled children walking hours home through the mountains, teachers living alongside them, and a graduation celebration at which each child brought two chickens for a barbecue on the hillside. He also described the school’s founder insisting that the children receive proper instruction, while visiting art students encouraged them to draw freely.

These experiences shaped Zhao’s paintings of children. He depicted them laughing, crying, playing in ruins or inventing games with whatever was around them. Their freedom reminded him of his own childhood in a small county town, while also prompting concern about the more restricted and supervised lives of children growing up in cities today.

The personal and the communal frequently meet in these works. Zhao sometimes painted his own son into a scene, openly acknowledging the “privilege” of the artist to place someone he loves within a picture. The gesture is more than a private joke. It turns the painting into a record of affection and of a child’s growth—something the son may return to and understand differently in later life.

The making of Ladder to Heaven

Zhao’s most detailed account concerned Ladder to Heaven (《天梯》, 2021), a painting inspired by the transformation of a remote cliffside community and the replacement of its perilous access route with a steel ladder.

Before painting it, Zhao made the journey himself. On his first attempt, he set off in July without adequate preparation. Although the vertical ascent was approximately one thousand metres, the heat, the hot metal pipes and his fear of heights defeated him; he estimated that he completed only about a third of the climb. Along the way, he met a local woman carrying bottled water up the mountain to sell. Her matter-of-fact verdict—that he would not make it to the top—became one of the human encounters he carried into the project.

The composition initially ran horizontally. Artist Chen Jian advised Zhao that only a vertical format could properly communicate the mountain’s precipitousness. The change, together with a zigzagging composition and backlit figures, gave the picture its force.

Even apparently minor elements required prolonged negotiation. Zhao wanted to retain pigs in the foreground because of their importance in local life. Other artists and advisers felt that the animals would compete with the human figures. After several rounds of revision, the pigs disappeared. Their removal left an awkward gap, which Zhao eventually filled with a stainless-steel cooking pot and bottled water—objects that also spoke of changes in daily living.

He spent roughly two years on the work. Near its completion, still dissatisfied, he took the canvas to a studio at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, where artist He Hongzhou was also working. The presence of a respected teacher and fellow painter supplied both pressure and encouragement. Even at the final stage, Zhao continued to adjust details and included his growing son within the painting.

The story of Ladder to Heaven was therefore not only a story about depicting a mountain. It was about learning to reconcile direct experience, human respect and pictorial form.

Why realism still matters

In the discussion that followed, Zhao was invited to compare his work with that of Liu Xiao Dong, another leading Chinese realist painter, and with the films Jia Zhangke made around Liu’s Three Gorges project.

Zhao acknowledged shared concerns: ordinary people, social change and the texture of lived experience. But he also identified differences of generation, region and temperament. Liu, a northeasterner born in the 1960s, brought what Zhao called a northeastern “cold humour” to his images, together with a forceful handling of paint and thick pigment. Zhao, born in the 1970s, described his own approach as more inward, though both artists worked within realist traditions and had absorbed lessons associated with Lucian Freud.

This comparison led to a larger question: why does figurative painting endure, and why does it remain relevant in an age of AI?

Zhao’s answer lay in individual sensation. Academic training teaches an artist to construct form accurately, but every painter understands accuracy, touch and expression differently. One artist turns inward; another explodes outwards. The resulting differences are not technical imperfections. They are precisely what allows a painting to communicate a particular person’s encounter with the world.

A Hong Kong portrait still to come

The conversation concluded with Zhao’s current commission from Chao Lee Art Foundation: a portrait of an outstanding Hong Kong athlete whose identity he did not disclose. The work is expected to be shown at the foundation’s first exhibition at the end of 2027.

Zhao approached the commission through his own understanding of Hong Kong. For his generation on the mainland, that understanding was shaped first by Hong Kong films and popular music, including the films of Stephen Chow. He spoke of Hong Kong’s inclusiveness, its encounter with different cultures and its connections with the mainland.

The choice of an athlete offered a way to express the city’s vitality. Athletic achievement depends on resilience, sustained effort and physical discipline, but it can also come to represent the strength of a place. Zhao acknowledged that portraiture remains one of the most difficult challenges in academic painting—and, paradoxically, one of the most directly affecting.

As the moderator observed in closing, whether Zhao paints children, food or labourers, his underlying subject is people and their lives. The foundation’s belief in portraiture rests on a similar conviction: a portrait records not only an individual likeness, but also the memory of an era, the character of a city and the spirit of a culture.

Zhao ended his presentation with a sentence that gathered together the afternoon’s themes: “Life endows artistic creation with authentic emotion and power.”

That idea also explains the talk’s title. Magnificent acts need not be grand gestures. They can be acts of attention: returning to a market, listening to a child, climbing a mountain, sharing a meal, or revising a canvas until it does justice to what the artist has seen and felt.