About Boris Uan-Zo-li
Boris Uan-Zo-Li was born in Moscow to a family shaped by three cultures and two centuries of upheaval. He is one-quarter Chinese, one-quarter Cossack, and one-half Jewish. His Chinese grandfather, Wang Zo Li, came to Russia in 1904. After the revolution, Wang Zo Li kept his Chinese full name — but a Soviet bureaucrat’s spelling error turned it into “Uan-Zo-Li.” The mistake became a legacy.
Boris’s father, Lazar Goykhman, was a Jewish civil engineer from Odessa. In 1953, at the height of Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaigns, Lazar was arrested and charged with “Zionism.” The KGB played a recording of him telling a friend — who turned out to be an undercover agent — that he would walk to Israel on foot if he could. Lazar was sent to a labor camp. He survived and was released in 1955.
A year earlier, in 1954, Boris’s mother bribed the passport office to change her son’s surname from the recognizably Jewish “Goykhman” to the ambiguous “Uan-Zo-li” — to protect him from persecution and allow him to enter college.
Boris graduated from the Moscow Power Institute in 1962. His diploma thesis was so original that it earned two patents on the spot. Over a thirty-year engineering career, he designed power supplies for the Soviet aerospace industry and authored 165 patents, becoming one of the USSR’s leading power electronics engineers.
But engineering was never the whole story. While working full-time as an engineer, Boris enrolled at the Moscow Polygraphic Institute and earned a Master’s degree in Book Illustration in 1969. By day he designed power systems; by night and on weekends he painted — developing a style his friends half-jokingly called “Uan-Zo-Lism.”
His paintings carry the structural discipline of an engineer and the expressive intensity of someone who lived under constraint. Architecture in his work is not decoration — it is compositional framework. Geometry carries psychological weight. Color articulates structure.
During the Soviet era, Boris exhibited four times. At one exhibition, a bureaucrat pulled his paintings at the last moment because they “did not fit the communist vision” — though his name still appeared in the catalogue. After the fall of communism, his work was shown at the Central House of Artists and the Exhibition Hall of the Moscow Union of Artists — among Russia’s most prestigious venues.
In 2010, Boris immigrated to the United States and settled in Oregon. His paintings are now privately held in Germany, Switzerland, France, and the United States. Oregon Jewish Life published a feature article about Boris in June 2018. He is a member of ORA, the Jewish cooperative of Artists of Oregon.
Exhibitions
• Central House of Artists, Moscow, 1987
• Central House of the Artists, Moscow, 1990
• Exhibition Hall of the Moscow Union of Artists, Moscow, 2009
Contact
To learn more or inquire about works, please contact his son, Alex Uan-Zo-Li.
Email: auanzoli@outlook.com
Website: uanzoli.com