Creative Philosophy

Giving traditional sculpture new life between history and the contemporary.

The creative inspiration stems from imagining the "complete form" of historically surviving sculptures. Over the long course of history, many sculptures have survived only in fragmentary states due to natural weathering, war, displacement, and human damage. Without written or visual records, it is difficult to accurately reconstruct their original appearance — yet the remaining partial forms leave vast imaginative space for contemporary viewers.

In Zhang Jiahao's view, incompleteness does not signify the end of a work's life, but rather the beginning of another life and narrative. Using surviving stone sculpture fragments as his creative foundation, he recombines stone and ceramic materials, employing a material language that is both ancient and young to restore the historical treasures he imagines.

This "restoration" is not an archaeological reconstruction, but a re-creation built upon personal feeling, historical imagination, and contemporary aesthetics. He does not attempt to conceal the wounds left by time's erosion on the stone sculptures, but instead preserves their ambiguity, damage, and uncertainty — and through new bodies, gestures, and symbolic structures, allows the incomplete forms to regain spiritual power.

His works establish connections between the ancient and the contemporary, the incomplete and the whole, the real and the imagined. The collision between different materials not only presents the layers of time, but also allows traditional sculptural forms to find new life within a contemporary context.

Representative Works