About this Event
Welcome to the **Art Closing Night** featuring Pop Zhao's latest exhibition titled "**Love . Compassion**"! Join us at **Etcetera Wine Bar** on **May 19th, 2026 at 5:00 PM** (Pacific Time) for an evening filled with creativity and inspiration. Immerse yourself in Zhao's captivating artwork that beautifully captures the essence of love and compassion. Don't miss this opportunity to connect with fellow art enthusiasts and celebrate the power of artistic expression. See you there! RSVP and get a glass of Bubbly upon arrival.
The Artist: Pop Zhao
Pop Zhao is known for a practice spanning painting, works on paper, and historically, large-scale public and participatory spectacles. Internationally, he is celebrated as a master of "earth art" and for creating the Guinness World Record-holding longest artwork, the 10,000-meter-long "Olympic Dragon." This monumental piece debuted in 2001, covering a section of the Great Wall of China to celebrate the nation winning the bid for the 2008 Olympics.
Zhao's practice, emerging from China, was first defined by politically charged performance pieces like Concept 21 in Beijing. After immigrating to the U.S., he adapted his focus to commemorative public art, including the five-mile-long silk banner of American flags memorializing 9/11 along the San Francisco Embarcadero, and the temporary canvas wrapping of the new Asian Art Museum (a piece that incorporated images from the Dragon). Furthermore, he served the city of San Francisco as an SF Arts Commissioner from 2005 to 2009.
In the two decades since his last public show, Zhao stepped back from the spotlight. This focused pause deepened his perspective, shifting his visual language to explore attention, presence, and the patterns of everyday life through vivid palettes, graphic rhythm, and contemplative compositions. He returns with renewed clarity and resonance. (extract SFGate's article: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Thinking-big-Sunset-District-artist-doesn-t-do-2630061.php)
This is a remarkably pure and powerful art project.
Five hundred paintings of "Tibetan Lama Meditation," using only the three elements of heaven, earth, and humanity, and only the three colors of blue, white, and red, are like five hundred silent mantras, or five hundred quiet lamps. Each one is different, yet all point to the same source: the tranquility and harmony of breathing in harmony with heaven and earth on the plateau.
When these five hundred works are ultimately treasured by five hundred people who truly understand their meaning, scattered in homes, meditation rooms, art galleries, or temples around the world, they will no longer be just individual paintings. They will become an invisible net, an invisible thread, quietly connecting five hundred hearts scattered in different corners of the earth through the same frequency.
What power will that bring? It's not a powerful, overwhelming force, but something extremely subtle yet indestructible:
• When someone sees this painting in their New York apartment, they might suddenly recall the sound of prayer flags fluttering in the wind on the plateau, and their heart will find peace.
• When someone is exhausted in their Tokyo office, looking up at that pure blue and white, their breathing will unconsciously slow down.
• When someone is alone in an ancient European castle, contemplating a lama in a red robe, their inner conflicts will inexplicably subside.
• When someone is on a pilgrimage route in Lhasa and sees another painting from the same series, they will feel that 499 strangers in the distance are sharing the same tranquility with them at that moment.
Five hundred points, connected to form an invisible meridian, flowing through the Earth with a faint yet steady pulse of "harmony and peace."
This is not a world-changing revolution, but something softer, yet more resilient: a global collective meditation, a silent practice lasting decades.
It won't make the news, it won't be factored into GDP, but it will be there, like the eternally burning butter lamps on the plateau, one after another, five hundred lamps burning simultaneously.
When I complete these five hundred paintings, and have them taken home by five hundred people who truly "understand," then this will be the purest, most understated, and most enduring peace movement of the 21st century.
It needs no slogans, no marches, just 500 hearts willing to hang a painting on their wall and pause to breathe in it each day as they pass by.
That's enough.
I sincerely admire and bless this project.
I'm starting to look for these 500 companions.
If you want to be one of them, take your own "contemplation" painting back to where you sit quietly, and let that line extend just one more inch.
500 art collectors:
1. Dave and Lynn (Dollas. Tx. USA
2. Jim and Sue (San Francisco. USA)
3. Robert and Margret (San Francisco, USA)
4. Rob and Kathryn ( San Francisco, USA)
5. Cynthia(San Francisco, USA)
6.Antony and Cathryn (San Francisco, USA)
7.Karen ( Monterey, USA)
8.Amil (San Francisco .USA)
9.Kat and Lewis ( San Francisco, USA)
10.Carolyn (San Francisco. USA)
11.Mary (San Francisco, USA)
12.Sage ( Las Vegas, USA)
13.Robert ( Florida, USA)
14.Peg (Santa Rosa , USA)
15.Anna (Seattle, USA)
16.Michael T. (Cherry creek, USA)
17.Jillian ( Oregon, USA)
18.Mary and Tom ( Tibron USA)
To be continued…🌷
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Etcetera Wine Bar, 795 Valencia Street, San Francisco, United States
USD 0.00
