ILLUSTRATED:
Zhou Chunya, Timezone 8, Hong Kong, 2010, color illustrated, pp. 544-545

After 2000, Zhou Chunya, who was best-known for his colorful green dog series of paintings at that time, began to pursue the style of abstraction art. His paintings of abstract art echoed his early works such as his Stone series, Body series and Landscape series. Zhou entered a phase of pursuing new artistic experiment and transformation. Gradually, the peach blossoms became an important or even dominant element of his paintings. At the beginning (1997), in Zhou's works the peach blossoms were rendered as the symbol of tenderness and beauty, creating a strong visual impact when juxtaposed with the subject of the paintings, the wolfdog. Zhou said he was much fascinated by this experiment. Any one who has some understanding of Chinese traditional culture knows in the Chinese symbolic world, the followers have some erotic symbolic meaning. But Zhou has his own way to tell erotic stories, namely using feminine tenderness as a foil to the masculine subject so as to express the attractiveness of sexual scenes. In Zhou's works, the red human body is a recurring erotic motif. To maximize the attractiveness of sexual scenes, Zhou retuned to the Chinese ancient tradition of conveying erotic scenes, namely fusing tender feeling with violence, or highlighting tender feeling as an end in the exercise of violence, as violence is always a counter motif of tender feeling. In Zhou's own words, the change of the subject of his paintings from the wolf-dog to peach blossoms relects a transformation from 'violence' to 'tenderness'. Actually, Zhou tries to use maximum tenderness to reinforce beautiful violence by borrowing the images of Chinese traditional paintings. ('Peach Blossoms and Moon of New Paintings-Zhou Chunya's Art Career' by Lu Peng)

Zhou likes the purity of plants and animals very much. His inspiration to create the Peach Blossoms series of paintings is sourced from his personal experience of watching peach blossoms in Chengdu. I do love things with strong vitality. One spring when I went to a flower mountain near Chengdu to watch peach blossoms, I was much impressed by the sea of pink peach blossoms full of a primitive life force. From that moment I decided to create my Peach Blossoms series of works. said Zhou.

The flowers are common painting objects of Chinese traditional paintings. In Zhou's Peach Blossoms series of paintings we can ind some trace of Chinese traditional lower paintings. But by employing ever-changing colors Zhou presents the peach blossoms on his canvas in a more dissolute and coquettish image. The image of peach blossoms symbolizes the coming of the spring season; in a broad sense, it also symbolizes love and sex. In Zhou's works, the light red color of the peach blossoms represents the very nature of erotic love. These works are filled with cultural meanings, transiguring the primitive or even savage sex impulse to a very elegant and complicated image. The peach blossoms also represent the painter's mood. In a world full of blossoming peach trees, the painter's mood becomes totally liberated. The images of peach blossoms in Chinese traditional culture have some hidden allusions to sex and reproduction, but in Zhou's works, the image of peach blossoms as the symbol of erotic love is presented in a more bold and apparent manner. In addition to a dissolute and coquettish image of peach blossoms, Zhou usually adds the image of men and women in red who are making love under the peach trees into his paintings. What I paint is 'sex and love', the instincts of human beings. The blossoming peach lowers are strangely juxtaposed with the men and women who are making love under the peach trees. This juxtaposition destroys the obstruction between human beings and nature as well as obscuring the boundary between moral and evil. In loating colors a world of fantasy has been created where the instincts and nature of human beings are fully liberated and released in a tender and also violent manner. Zhou said. The image of blossoming peach lowers expresses an unrestful mood between lourishing and withering. As time passes, we grow old with increasingly growing regret and resentment.

Zhou's Peach Blossoms series of works demonstrate an artistic style between the traditional and the avant-garde. He displays the tension between tradition and modern in a natural way by incorporating the form of western art and the spirit of oriental culture.

In this piece, Peach Blossoms Series – Year after Year the Flowers Bloom, the artist presents a fleeting glimpse of a peach blossom grove. The pink flowers in the foreground and green leaves dotted in between form a pleasing contrast while rich soil depicted in the center of the work and vaguely visible peach trees in the distance create a delightful spring scene. This particular piece is noteworthy because it exemplifies the artist’s mastery of color; a wide swathe of pink and highly saturated green combine to form a sharp tonal contrast, with the artist’s carefully crafted black trunk of the peach tree serving as an anchor to balance the picture. The yellow that manifests the soil and transparent blue of the sky together aggrandize the rhythm of the color on the canvas. In recent years, Zhou has become increasingly interested in studying poetry and paintings from the Ming and Qing dynasties. Indeed, the subtle influences of traditional aesthetics on his work are especially discernible in the way the artist portrays the rustling movement of the tree’s branches.