When art is a party

My Garden, a self-portrait of Zhao. [Photo provided to China Daily]

This assembly of works on loan from collectors around the world show his concerns with social issues via his "romantic and personal account of the country's evolving reality", UCCA director Philip Tinari says.

The earliest piece is the painting, The Lipstick Girl, which Zhao completed in 1987.

He was then a junior at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. His instructor was Jin Shangyi, an established oil painter who initiated the country's neo-classical realism in painting in the 1980s.

The piece shows Zhao's exploration of this novel style. It earned him a place among young talented Chinese painters when it was displayed at exhibitions in the early 1990s.

Zhao says it has been nearly three decades since he saw The Lipstick Girl.

It was last sold to Taikang Insurance Group for 13.8 million yuan ($2.08 million) at a Beijing auction in 2015.

Zhao says he began to feel miserable about working on canvas even as he received acclaim.

"I was weak and anxious. Even after I completed a painting, I was not satisfied with it. I would wake up at midnight to check the work," he says.

"I was afraid that I would disappoint myself."

He felt like he was fighting on a battlefield when he faced canvases.

"I was lonely. I needed a change," he says.

"Painting is a rather quiet process during which I don't converse with the world but with myself. Thus, I want to do something that opens me up to people outside."