“Zhang Lehua is the ultimate epitome of the young Shanghai artists born in the 1980s, who grew up in Shanghai and had practically never travelled far abroad. They are a hybrid mix of talent, nihilism, emptiness, hard-heartedness, innocence and warmth. From an early point, Zhang Lehua has considered “painting well” and “being a good student” to be a disgrace; he has strived and contrived to remain vigilant of all pre-existing rules, attempting to skirt and sidestep them. Every time I want to give him a few kicks, I always immediately find what is moving in him: he has kept up with his usual earnestness in “interrupting and interpreting” all kinds of mass information, generating various varieties of the inarticulate, of self-mockery, and of self-abuse. I do not know if he is innately broken or if he had once been deeply damaged. He doubts all value systems in education and art, but I absolutely do not doubt that he has always been a serious artist. His artistic experimentation is like burrowing into one frightful cave after another; whenever he reemerges from the cave, we all eagerly await his next experiment.” Mian Mian

“My recent work is based on painting, this rich system of a medium. I still take “observation”, “experience”, and “description” as the basis for action—yet rather ironically “interpreting” the scenes of reality we see and attempting a bit cruelly to produce specimens out of what we see.” Zhang Lehua