Zhou Jirong 周吉荣, born 1962 in Xin'an, Guizhou province, is a contemporary Chinese print artist, and deputy head of department of printmaking in the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Having numerous group and solo exhibitions around the world, his Beijing series is probably the best known of all his works. Depicting various scenes of corners, alley ways and common people of the city, Zhou captures a nostalgic sentiment towards a city that has been going through dramatic changes and modernisation, and a part of it that has been drastically disappearing and diminishing.
"The recent urbanisation in China has made cities like Beijing less particularly Chinese and more like any other international city - with all the associated environmental problems, upheavals of social order and overturning of traditional moral principles brought about by such progress. Driving around the ever-expanding city of Beijing, it is hard to recognise its unique characteristics. My relationship to the city has become blurry, hazy. It seems I have placed myself in a dream-world with no special features, no self, no sense of belonging … in a ficticious space...." - Zhou Jirong