Zhao Zilin was graduated from Fine Art Department of Shandong University of Arts. He once worked as a senior art teacher of Shandong Beizhen High School and Dean of Fine Art Department of Binzhou College of Education. As a local art educator, he has cultivated a large number of excellent art talents in nearly half a century and has pupils everywhere. While teaching, Zhao Zilin concentrates on studies of fine art theory and artistic creation. He has a wide interest in fine arts and then focuses on freehand Chinese painting. His freehand flower-and-bird paintings are not academic, even not of purely traditional literati paintings, but the plain and wonderful flowers blooming in the vast countryside. It seems they connect fracture parts of traditional culture and present a complete original Chinese cultural view on flower-and-bird paintings.

Shao Dazhen makes comments that Zhao Zilin’s flower-and-bird paintings absorb essence of the older generation but do some innovations by borrowing brushwork of big-seal style. The lines are vigorous, simple, honest and unadorned, which highlights the predominant role of subjective ideas in process of creation and pursuit to tempo of accomplishing the work at one go, abstract meanings among strokes and combined rhyme of lines in calligraphy, creating another style of simple and unsophisticated pictures.

The exhibition displays over 60 pieces of Zhao Zilin's flower-and-bird paintings, which reveal understanding and perception of Zhao Zilin to “freehand” of Chinese flower-and-bird paintings. In these works, “hand” plays a leading role and “free” is the soul. No stroke is meaningless and no shape exists in name only. The exhibited works cover a wide variety of themes-waterside of countryside, wide flowers and grass, animals and plants in nature are all endowed with new vitality. Ferocious goshawk, arrogant rooster, darting kingfishers in the wind and catfish swimming against the current are all depicted with fast and lively ink, integrated form and spirit, complete spirit and meaning.