“Testing, testing” - these words so familiar in recording studios and movie sets apply equally to Zhao 7Aao who is always testing how tar he can go before retribution sets in. Since he was reprimanded for streaking when he was still a student there have been other occasions when he oversteps the line, notably a recent dispute on the Airport Expressway in Belling when things got out of hand and he ended up in jail tor twelve days but there have been many others when nothing happens at all, the successful challenging of authority becoming the. subject matter of the work. Think, for example, of what might have happened when he broke of some lead from an Anselm Kiefer installation in the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin to use as raw material in a new work, glued a cobblestone to Tiananmen Square or posed as a policeman in front of the Crate of Heavenly Peace on the same day as the opening of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. He might have been arrested or might simply have “disappeared” for an indefinite period.

Zhao Zhao's Constellations acquired their name late one night when Chris Mao and I stopped by his studio in Caochangdi to see what was going on Propped against the wail was a pane of glass scattered with holes that appeared to have been caused by stones or bullets and that were reminiscent of a constellation of stars. Living in a city mostly lacking in stars as a result of pollution, Zhao Zhao seemed to be compensating for this in his perforated pane of glass, hence the birth of what was to become the series of Constellations.

Titles are generally afterthoughts and in this respect Zhao Zhao's Conflations are no exception. Astronomy was far from his mind when earlier this year he decided to conduct an experiment involving gun-shots and glass, a difficult undertaking in China where with very few exceptions private ownership of guns is illegal. Unlike the United States where guns are widely available with predictable results - think only of the most recent tragic mass shooting of school children in the small town of New-town, Conn. - China makes access to weapons next to impossible so it requires considerable ingenuity for a private citizen even to get close to a weapon. That Zhao Zhao is a maverick is no surprise given the fact that he grew up and was educated in remote Xinjiang Province and became part of Ai Weiwei's inner circle when he moved to Beijing. Less overtly political than his mentor, however, Zhao Zhao approaches authority with a dare-me-not-to bravado when he does something he knows he should not be doing. Fully aware that his activities do not go un-noticed by the authorities, he presents them with faits accomplis that cannot be reversed.

Constellations, is the latest addition to a sequence of twentieth century works in which firearms were the preferred medium. Marcel Duchamp was first in the Nine Shots, a group of nine holes drilled in the top right-hand corner of The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, (the Large Glass), 1915-23 although he used a toy cannon with a match dipped in paint as a projectile rather than actual weapon. As described by Richard Hamilton: "A carefully aimed shot is fired at a “target” point. Two more shots from the same position produce spots at varying distances around the target, since neither his skill nor the instrument is unerring. This process repeated from two other positions gives nine points. The target is, according to Duchamp, “demultiplied” - a phenomenon he developed metaphysically. If the nine spots are joined in sequence, in the manner of a numbers drawing, the result is a jagged plane. If lines are drawn vertically below the points of this plane we get a fluted column. Therefore the one-dimensional target is said to embody "the schema of any object whatever," in much the way that a single living cell carries within it the potential of a complex organic development." Actual gunshorts rang out with some regularity in the 1960s. Shortly after William Burroughs’ “shotgun” paintings in which he aimed a pistol at a can of paint placed in front of a sheet of plywood and Niki de Saint-Phalle's "Tirs" (shooting paintings) in which she aimed pistols or rifles at assemblages containing concealed paint cans, the California-based performance artist Chris Burden arranged to have himself shot in the arm by an assistant on the afternoon of November 19, 1971. Standing at a distance of fifteen feet or so, the marksman was not a very good shot since the bullet penetrated Burden's arm instead of being a graze wound as intended. Predating the extreme performances that were characteristic of Chinese contemporary art in the 1990s, Burden's punishing treatment of his own body coincided with the considerable political unrest that accompanied the Vietnam War and the racial conflicts of the time. 

In China the most famous gunshot in contemporary art occurred on February 5, 1989 at the opening of the "China/Avant-Garde" exhibition at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing. Three hours after the opening of the exhibition Xiao Lu fired two shots at her installation Dialogue which consisted of a mirror flanked by two telephone booths containing images of a male and female student talking to each other. As a challenge to China's strict laws governing gun ownership and a possible danger to public safety, it is not surprising that the exhibition was forced to close for three days while the Beijing Public Security Bureau investigated the circumstances behind the shooting. However, as Gao Minglu has explained, Xiao Lu's motivation seems to have been a complex mixture of the political and the private.

When young artists such as Zhao Zhao go out on a limb, they tend to act instinctively, any knowledge of possible antecedents remaining largely unconscious. He is certainly aware that the Large Glass is made from glass and that it cracked symmetrically when it was being shipped from the Brooklyn Museum in 1926 although I doubt that he has investigated too deeply the procedure used in the execution of the ~Nine Shot's. I don't suppose he cares too much that Burroughs, de Saint-Phalle and Chris Burden all used firearms in some of their works except in so far as their license to do so reveals the contrasting attitude of China and Western societies in this matter. He was only a child when Xiao Lu aimed a pistol at the mirror in the National Art Museum of China in 1989 although this event has since gained considerable notoriety, deserved or not.

As it happens, Zhao Zhao has no particular interest in firearms per se but he is intrigued by the idea of utilizing the velocity of bullets to create works of art in a carefully controlled manner. To be sure, there is a contrarian streak in everything that Zhao Zhao does, in his paintings as much as in his actions and the objects that result from them, and the use of firearms in Constellations leads inevitably to a consideration of violence, whether public or private. Much to his surprise, the glass panels that result from these shooting sessions with their irregular placement of bullet holes surrounded by cracks are undeniably beautiful, reminiscent of the stars that constitute the constellations.