Summer Blue Series – Watercolour Paintings by Fucai Zhao

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Fucai Zhao, “Gastown Steam Clock,” 2024

watercolour, 56 x 36 cm (courtesy of the artist)

Opening Reception: October 10, 7-9pm

Summer Blue Series – Watercolour Paintings by Fucai Zhao

Featuring Vancouver cityscape and landscape watercolours by artist Fucai Zhao.

Lipont Gallery is presenting dozens of Chinese artist Fucai Zhao’s recent watercolour paintings to the audience in the Greater Vancouver area for the first time. Zhao graduated from the China Academy of Art and is an art professor. He is an established watercolour painter. This exhibition features works he created during his midsummer stay in Vancouver this year, based on the city's characteristics, cultural features, and natural scenery.

“Vancouver’s pleasant climate and unique urban environment gave me the urge to paint. I painted several sketches of street scenes in Downtown Vancouver. Watercolour landscape sketches can free oneself, and creation can allow artists to think more fully. My watercolour works show the beauty in nature. People crave for beauty while being caught in the daily grind of the mundane. I just want to provide viewers with some beautiful reverie and comfortable mood through the expression of poetic watercolour paintings. Vancouver’s public transportation system, fire protection facilities, road signs and traffic lights are its unique city symbols.”

Zhao’s works absorb the composition form and meaning of Chinese painting and strive for realism in terms of expression techniques. This creative combination of Chinese and Western watercolour painting and the changes in modern people's aesthetic vision have made him begin to reconsider the new meaning of composition representation, which has prompted him to present a more holistic, simpler, stronger and more concentrated aesthetic feature in the composition form, which is pleasing to the eyes and heart of the viewer. The vivid and lively colours, the hearty and relaxed pictures, and the watercolour paintings that blend water and colour can be as objective and realistic as Western oil paintings and can also have the freehand and lyrical style of Chinese ink paintings.