Zhao Suikang
Zhao, Suikang (赵穗康) is a Chinese-American artist who works on different media and genre including painting, sculpture, site-specific installation, interdisciplinary art and monumental public art projects. Early life. Zhao was born in Shanghai, China in 1956. He went to Haifeng farm after staying at home for three and half years of self-education after graduating from middle school. He went to the countryside as part of the Chinese re-education program of the time, and was part of the first generation of Chinese students who attended college after 13 years of closure of higher education during  the Cultural Revolution. In 1979, he went to study at the Art Department, Shanghai Normal College. Upon his graduation in 1983, he was assigned a teaching job at Shanghai No.6th Normal School in 1983. A year later he was expelled from the school, becoming one of few jobless independent artists at the time in China. Zhao left China and went to graduate school at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco in 1986. Dissatisfied with the program, he dropped out, and left San Francisco for New York in 1987. From 1988-1990, Zhao enrolled in the graduate program at  the School of Visual Arts, where he received the MFA degree. Zhao joined as a faculty member at the Fine Arts Department off the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York in 1996. Career. After his relocation to the United States in 1986 and upon his graduation from the School of Visual Arts in 1990, Zhao was one of the first artists trying to transform Bushwick, Brooklyn into an artist's community. While in Bushwick he worked and exhibited extensively, producing many sculptures and installations over the following six years. In 1996, he created his first earth art  project for the Djerassi Foundation in California during a temporary artist's residency. A year later, he had his first major solo exhibition at the Neuberger Museum of Art in 1997. Throughout his career Zhao has received many awards, including the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Individual Artist Media Production Award. Since 1998, Zhao has created numerous, large-scale, permanent artworks for the public all over the country. Many of Zhao's public art projects involve the general public. Works. Zhao has done many paintings , sculptures, and media-site-specific installations that involve moving images and sound, including: Public Artwork