Zhao Bandi may not be a familiar name. But when mention "the man on the posters with a panda", people would recall the "Panda Man" in the Beijing subway or on Shanghai's Huaihai Lu.

His work - photographs featuring him and a stuffed panda toy in various dramatic situations - deals with all kinds of public topics, from jay-walking and drug problems to AIDS and the SARS crisis.

Last year, his work on the anti-SARS campaign, which showed him and the panda armed with rifles and dressed in military fatigues and gauze masks, were published in Beijing newspapers without giving the artist any credit.

He sued the papers and won the case. Zhao collected tapes of the argument in court from TV stations and made a short film, which was premiered in Shanghai last week.

"He has great talent in performance," said the director of the premiere party, Zhu Wen.

Controversial figure

Shifting freely between art, law, film and other fields, 38-year-old Zhao has become a highly controversial figure. Although he is active in many art events abroad, there is little comment about him in art media circles in China.

As some Chinese art critics see it, what he does is advertising, not art.

But Zhao did start as an artist in the traditional sense of the word. "I studied art for four years in high school and majored in classical oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts after another four years study," said the "Panda Man". To be a painter remained his dream for many years and he made great efforts to realize his dream.

"I would get out of the bed at night, to check my current painting, to see if it was as perfect as I remembered," he said.

Soon after graduation, he gained an opportunity to participate in an exhibition of avant-garde art from China in Berlin.

Being exhibited in the same hall as Western masters made him feel his dream to become a painter had been fulfilled.

But he also recalled the anxiety and hardship he experienced in painting and he decided to give it a rest for a while. He took the money he had made from sales of his paintings and went on a global tour.

It was during a casual visit to Beijing Zoo that he picked up the first panda toy and took a picture of himself and a girlfriend with the panda toy.

"I thought it beautiful and tried to publish it and sell it as a calender poster," he said.

It turned out to be a failure - he invested 40,000 yuan in the project for a return of only a few thousand.

Surprisingly, early the next year in 1997, he received an invitation from the Sydney Biennale, asking him to develop a project with his panda.

He turned in a lyrical picture of himself and the panda in a boat surrounded by lotus blossom. The poster remained on sale years after the artistic festival ended but he was pessimistic about opportunities for the panda work in China.

Affinity with public

Always trying to get a reaction from his fellow countrymen, he sought ways to make his work connect with the Chinese public.

He decided to work on public subjects and he had no difficulty at all in finding such topics. "Open the newspaper and you find them everywhere," he said.

He would make up as a laid-off worker, a victim of automobile exhaust fumes, a nurse or a violent criminal. The pictures soon appeared in Beijing subway stations, where he was given the advertising space for free.

His artist friends said it was a great pity that he had abandoned painting. "They don't think pop culture belongs to the fine arts," Zhao said. But he was soon accepted as a representative of contemporary Chinese art. "Like the black and white of a panda, I appear as two sharply different images at home and abroad," he said.

An exhibition of his panda works will tour England and is entitled: "The Chinese Panda Man".

He has started a new project in which he will talk with the panda about England. Zhao plans to make it into a TV series to be shown in China.

"People say I have kidnapped a beloved animal which is representative of China," Zhao said. "But as time goes by, I often feel passive in the role of the 'Panda Man'. I feel as if I have been hijacked by the panda instead.

(Shanghai Star June 25, 2004)