It is hard to use a single face or expression to represent an era, but a monumental and voluminous work about an era wouldn't necessarily exhaust all of the implications of a visual artistic creation. This is because the prosecution of the eye's expression can only add to the vitality at the extreme limits of written language. Through inspection at a certain distance, the hidden reality and cares of the inner self can appear in unimaginable ways.

There is no modern metropolis that is not brimming with desire, pathology, wickedness and ugliness; it has used its own invisible hand to shape it into a massive alien existence that constrains the people. Especially in this current process of societal transformation, the hearts of city people are in an unbalanced state that is full of temptation, surprise and anxiety. The recognition of this state of affairs was a conceptual presupposition of many earlier artists for their “urban works”, and it was clearly marked throughout their “urban” text. Works that focused on the theme of the restlessness and apprehension of contemporary life became a center of excitement for many artists; this is a mirror on the contemporary Chinese urban scene, and a record and portrait of contemporary Chinese life. After innumerable rises and falls for contemporary art, it came to focus more and more on the essence of the human soul, and pressed closer to the level of intrinsic human nature. When Zhao Nengzhi's brush strokes approach closer to realistic life, it is not just to realize a true-to-life portrait, but to visually penetrate the appearances of life; through vivid imagination and dignified expression, he uses a “self-examination” method to express a pondering and questioning of the circumstances of personal existence. From the angle of visual effect, his recent oil paintings and sculptures sketch the image of a series of strange feminine smiles that spring forth through you or your lens. The pink, pimpled, wrinkled faces are draped with bleached blond hair; the colors are murky yet resplendent; the forms are bizarre and shocking, even with a hint of ruthless violence. It is as if he is emphasizing the formalism in the visual image and the delights of the oil painting language, he is bringing the artificial poise of the commercialized “fashionable woman” and the unequivocally dissembled mental state at its ugliest in an attempt to handle the recently rising Chinese consumer society's fashioned, virtualized life in a more standardized and pop-ified form, using an exaggerated tone to figuratively outline the vivid absurdity of our era's material and spiritual worships. He is taking different female facial expressions and changing them into a pure form sense, and developing this sense of form to a degree that will shock and intoxicate. But he hasn't overlooked or weakened its social utility or moral criticism. Though these forms have an exaggerated standardized layout, the vivid absurdity of their state of existence still manages to pop out. This state of existence concentrates and refracts a side perspective of China's current fashion consumer culture. It is if these women are just floating around, with no beginning or end. Their realistic lives are just like this; all they can do is search for something in surprise and perplexity with open mouths and wide eyes. An odd facial expression emerges from within the gloomy colors of the background; it presents the desires that are rooted in the mind and drains off this contradictory mood. It also deduces the dreams that are slowly being alienated from these women through the process of existence. Through these works we can see that the artist's intent was to bestow the greatest content and formic effects on a key behavioral image. This kind of effect is possessed of a complex symbolic meaning to symbolize and make real this ever-growing consumer scene of our society through this group of women, so that this visual image can move from an unreal level to a realistic level to express his profound concern for this society and its personal apprehensiveness.

“Eyes wide open” in fact is an inability to close the eyes from this perplexed gaze at the world; it is a heaven constructed from the material world, making people unable to grasp themselves or recognize others; the “wide open mouth” smile expresses a wholly emotional world, a color that dazes people, giving us nothing to choose but anxiety, a nervousness and even terror when facing the world. It gives the “me” in this society a thorough explanation and annotation. In fact, this is a groundbreaking metaphor; those strange expressions reveal the difficult position of these women, and when they have some dubious relationships, it is not for standout differences in personality, but a feeling of surprise and fear, a hint at a step towards violence and death. It provides a terrifying narrative that contains desire, death and fear, and also includes a suddenly realized ruthlessness, and everything in the end returns to the realm of the ordinary and peaceful, something that still contains a thread of grief, but is endowed with power. The creation of anxiety and fear in the ordinary is hard to come by; it shows that Zhao Nengzhi's imagination already holds an irreplaceable value. Rather than say that it surrealistically presented the women's unified expressions, I'd rather sat that it is the author's suffering, exposure and critical exaggeration towards the production of such images. The ridiculous forms display the essence of existence; this makes the enchantment of these images both void and ruthless. This preposterousness also points directly at reality, both chaotic and anxious. This also makes it so that the viewer can never attain complete relaxation or delight, but, when we submerge ourselves in the depths of the seemingly ridiculous scenes of each painting, submerge ourselves in these astounded gazes, we can vividly experience the eccentricity of human nature, the preposterousness of existence, and the questioning approach that is permeates the context and the creative theme. Maybe he is more interested in the potential and the absurdity of surrealism. He tangles together the fragmentary human forms with an absurdity of appearance; in other words, Zhao Nengzhi, through the realistic, figurative and illusory expressive method has created a scene where they are indivisible in a real yet unreal presentation of the diabolical theatre that is urban life. He tells us without words that it would appear that nothing about urban life is within our ability to grasp, that we are just being controlled by a magic invisible hand, and that we all appear weak and helpless. This has unemotionally shattered the many myths regarding “modernization” and the vain desires and fabrications of the people's conception of Utopia. It must be emphasized that he has concentrated the state of urban life into the faces of these women, and while he has been exaggerating, bending and warping them, he has not turned them into some fearsome demon completely removed from our life experience, or a ridiculous world wholly removed from our specific urban space since the ‘90's till now. He is using the emphasis on his pictures to reach a warning and introspection into the abuses of the modernization process, and on the utilization of this state of cultural affairs that people are in, express some beautiful dreams of what would be best for human habitation, and ensure that mankind would never, after reaching the highest extreme of material development, see the death and disappearance of spirit and morals. Zhao Nengzhi's works help us to truly experience the helplessness and divisions of reality. Helplessness is the reality we must face, and the problem we must transcend. Above helplessness is the sky of the spirit and below helplessness lays the abyss of the spirit. Division is the spiritual perplexity and conscientious decision that we also must face in life. He has exposed the illusory character of contemporary people; what is lost is exactly the fantasy and the result of crumbling reality. Once we have lost our sense of reality, we can only meet with cold mocking and self-mocking.

Romantic ridiculousness and ruthless existence would appear to be two opposite extremes, but their mutual interchange holds connotations of life's own subtleness. The motionless lens can only record an instant, but Zhao Nengzhi's works, through his artistic treatment with his language methods, colors and image construction, show startling faces that are in the continuous act of being. Here, we have a deep self-examination of the current state of existence, and a boundless realm for artistic imagination.