Zhou Fan’s Kaleidoscopic Paintings Blend Dreams with Reality

The open road below rolls to the horizon, an endless strip of potential, a passport to adventure. Somewhere along the journey, the sky has fractured into horizontal bands of colour and the trees are glimmering electric fractals.

Chinese artist Zhou Fan introduces a new connotation to the phrase ‘road trip’ with these distorted landscapes. Earlier work has revolved largely around exploring dream life, but these appear to be dreams had whilst awake. God knows what he keeps in the glove box to inspire these augmented realities. But then, without wanting to speculate overly, people often assume work like this is derived from some kind of narcotic experimentation when often it is simply a projection of the artist’s imagination. We like to put things in boxes to understand them, but sometimes things aren’t that simple. Some people naturally have access to altered realities, or like to evoke them in their work without necessarily having to live inside a lava lamp.

Zhou Fan’s career was launched in 2007 when he was selected from over 1300 entries as one of the top 3 emerging Chinese contemporary artists in the Chinese Art Prize, giving him the opportunity to show work in Beijing, Toronto, New York and Dubai. This series is more painterly and less graphic than his earlier surrealist portraiture, all of which can be seen on his online portfolio.