Zhong was born in Zhongshan, China and arrived in Australia at the age of 19 in 1989. Zhong’s early paintings ‘Stupid Laughing Series’ 1996 conveyed the exploration of his cultural heritage. Since these works, Zhong has continued to explore issues of cultural identity, transcultural identity, belonging and place. Since completing a Masters of Fine Arts from the Chelsea School of Art, London in 1998, Zhong has further explored these cultural issues. A further exploration of traditional Chinese art has influenced Zhong’s choice of using traditional Chinese subject matter in his paintings and thus the pixel paintings were developed in 1999. The pixel paintings incorporate images of Chinese portraits, animals and landscape, each of which is central to the genre of traditional Chinese ink brush painting. By using traditional Chinese inspired images Zhong conveys a sense of his cultural identity. Zhong uses the pixel as a symbol of the contemporary world that we live in. He has combined the process of using traditional images with a contemporary pixelated technology and the pixel is a symbol of the global modern world. Each individual pixel is flat and combines to make up images that we see in the computer, media and in all digital technology. The flatness in each pixel has a similar flatness to the traditional Chinese woodblock prints. By using the pixel, a time in place is defined, of not a specific culture but of a 21 st Century computer generated global world. Zhong’s paintings let us explore the technology of our time and the contemporary changing place of our society.