Zhang Xiaotao

Last updated
Zhang Xiaotao
Born1970 (age 53–54)
Hechuan, Chongqing, China

Zhang Xiaotao (born 1970 in Hechuan, Chongqing, China), is a Chinese painter based in Beijing and Chengdu.

Contents

He graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 1996. He then became a teacher in the Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu and this lasted from 1996 to 2009. In 2010 Xiaotao taught in the New Media Department of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. Now he lives and works in Beijing and Chongqing.

Zhang makes paintings with sexual imagery often involving small animals such as frogs and snakes, [1] and incorporating images of putrefaction and pollution. [2]

His work Condom Series: Enlarged Props – Crystal And Fishes 2 sold for US$64,500 at Sotheby's Hong Kong in 2007. [3]

Near death experiences

When Xiaotao was seven, he visited the shore of the Yangtze River to play with his friends. His brother's friend pulled young Xiaotao into the current, just messing around, but soon lost control and had to swim ashore. Xiaotao remained out in the water and almost drowned before an adult who could brave the current came to his rescue. That tentative, struggling moment between life and death influences the artist's work expansively. His watery paint-strokes summon additional, related junctures of mortal existence: the point between conception and life, the limbo between death and afterlife, the suspension of time during coital climax. Xiaotao had an additional swimming accident, that too at the age of 7. Xiaotao now has frequently recurring dreams about drowning which, coupled with his accidents, most likely accounts for all the water imagery in his work.

"Joyful Time" display

This display took place in Oakland, California at the Pacific Bridge Gallery.

Zhang Xiaotao's "A Joyful Time," displays huge oil and watercolor paintings inviting viewers into a bright underwater world of copulating frogs and intertwined human forms, the reaction "elated and free" may come to mind. In the display amphibious creatures float unencumbered in washes of blue, green, and orange paint, with their outlines making whimsical, eye-pleasing shapes. Perhaps this is a reflection of Xiaotao's background. Xiaotao nearly drowned as a child and is afraid of water and he comes from a country whose reproductive policies are heavy-handed and punitive.

In Zhang's opinion, oil paint is made to reflect the character of an ancient culture while embracing modern themes and colors. Fish, snakes, human faces, beer mugs, and condoms are repeating elements used by Xiaotao which appear in intricate layers of paint that defy opacity. The creatures' hues are often the blues and greens of the traditional Chinese pottery and carvings that can be found in jade markets, but placed in front of or behind the animals' outlines are shapes and symbols that would challenge, if not startle, any unsuspecting market regular.

In more than one painting, a pair of frogs hug blissfully, doggie-style. They are free-falling, not anchored to anything except each other-getting ready, perhaps, for their parachutes to open. On one canvas, they look skyward against a backdrop of floating clouds. On another surface, their background is a motif of human couplings taken from an ancient Chinese "pillow book" of how-to positions for adults.

The repetitiveness of the pillow-book images evokes pop art. But where Andy Warhol used a checkerboard of soup cans or Marilyn's head, here the repeated element is always erotic: trios and couples in sexual play, sprinkled lightly across the backdrop. They make the canvas, from a distance, look like a textile, like a bed sheet.

While pop artists of the '50s and '60s were paying homage to postwar consumerism and icons of mass-production, China was still in the throes of the Cultural Revolution. But here Zhang turns to his artistic predecessors and, as if making up for lost time, incorporates their method. Even the vibrant sheen that some of his paintings seem to give off is reminiscent of silk screening, a mass-production technique that Warhol adopted in the early 1960s.

Some of the largest works, at the back of the gallery, are also the most provocative. In dark gray-green hazes float huge, rubbery shapes. They are transparent sheaths with reservoir tips, and faces peer from behind, or inside. Tiny bubbles are suspended within the wrinkled tubes, and here and there a splattered dollop of red paint contrasts with the green. The faces glisten as if behind a windowpane, and their wide-eyed constraint elicits sadness.

Everywhere in Zhang's work one finds splotches of the red paint. It appears to be mixed with something that won't quite blend with it, and the effect is that of a potato stamp made from a bumpy, many-eyed spud. In the context of sex and birth, though, these bubbles and deep-red blotches are semen and blood. They are the repeating threads of humanity: liquids that transmit life, inheritance, and the most essential fluids of ancestry-containing not only DNA, but also the ways in which we (both animals and humans) need each other and hurt each other. In their aqueous environment, the drops, smears, and splotches also remind one of amoebas seen under a microscope, like beads of a primordial sea.

The sensation of water is hard to shake. The oil paint itself has a liquid quality-it has been thinned enough to resemble watercolour from a short distance -and layered images often appear soaked, suspended, or dripped on. Zhang's frequently recurring dreams about drowning presumably account for all the water imagery in his work; his preoccupation stems from two swimming accidents when he was seven years old: one happened at the shore of the powerful Yangtze River, where he was playing with his companions. His brother's friend had pulled him into the current, teasingly, but soon lost control and had to swim ashore. Zhang remained out in the water and was almost dead before an adult who could brave the current came to his rescue. That tentative, struggling moment between life and death informs the artist's work expansively. His watery paint-strokes summon additional, related junctures of mortal existence: the point between conception and life, the limbo between death and afterlife, the suspension of time during coital climax.

If every one of Zhang's paintings, as he claims, is a glimpse into his dreams about drowning, then it would seem his nightmares have faded over time and produced aesthetic remnants. Yet new demons, universal ones, have popped out of his work while he processed his fears. The underwater trauma that transformed itself into beauty via paint and repetition reinvents itself here with new sociological and psychological overtones. Something new is displacing his original memories, overlaying passion upon experience, and revealing the intersection of childhood and adulthood.

Awards

2012
2011
2010
2009
2008
1996

Solo exhibitions

2016
2014
2013
2012
2011
2010
2008
2007
2006
2005
2004
2003
2002
2001
2000

Group exhibitions

2015
2014
2013
2012
2011
2010
2009
2008
2007
2006
2005
2004
2003
2002
2001
2000
1999
1997
1996

Selected exhibitions

2007
2006
2005
2004
2003
2002
2001
2000

Individual pieces of work

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zhang Dali</span> Chinese graffiti artist

Zhang Dali is an artist based in Beijing.

Li Huasheng (1944–2018) was a Chinese artist from Yibin in Sichuan province. He received his first art training in one of Chongqing's culture halls. He met Chen Zizhuang in 1972, and studied traditional Chinese painting under him, mastering his style in just four years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sui Jianguo</span>

Sui Jianguo, professor and ex-chairman of the Department of Sculpture in Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, is a contemporary Chinese artist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zhang Xiaogang</span> Chinese painter (born 1958)

Zhang Xiaogang is a contemporary Chinese symbolist and surrealist painter. Paintings in his Bloodline series are predominantly monochromatic, stylized portraits of Chinese people, usually with large, dark-pupiled eyes, posed in a stiff manner deliberately reminiscent of family portraits from the 1950s and 1960s. Recently, he also created sculptures, translating for the first time into three dimensions many characters of the sort seen in his "Bloodlines—Big Family" portrait series. These sculptures have featured in many exhibits and continue his work as one of China's leading, and most highly sought-after, contemporary artists.

Miao Xiaochun is an artist and photographer based in Beijing.

Xia Xiaowan is a painter.

Li Qing is a Chinese artist based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China.

Li Yan is an oil painting artist, born in Jilin, China in 1977, who lives and works in Beijing, China.

Shang Yang is a contemporary Chinese painter based in Beijing and is considered one of the most important painters of the life-stream movement. Known for his oriental humanist thought he believes landscapes are living things and puts their spirit into his brushwork. In 1965 he graduated from the Hubei Art Academy, where he then taught for several years. He received his masters from the Hubei Art Academy in 1981. Yang became the Associate President in 1989. Shang Yang became a Professor and the Officer-in-Charge of Fine Arts at the Research Institute of South China Normal University in 1993. Also in 1993, he became the Vice President of the Chinese Art painting Society. Shang Yang has exhibited extensively in China since the 1980s, including at Shanghai Biennale in 1996, and has shown internationally at galleries in London, Paris, Tokyo, St. Petersburg, and Helsinki. Shang Yang's work often appropriates images from traditional Chinese landscape painting, which are screened onto the canvas by a machine; he then distorts the image with graffiti or obtrusive geometrical designs. His works combine avant-garde exploration and solid artistic skill to create unique works of expressionism oil painting.

Wei Guangqing is a contemporary Chinese painter. He is known most of all for his Red Wall and Made in China Series. Wei Guangqing was one of the main members of the “85’s New Wave Art Movement”. In the 1990s he became one of the most well-known "political Pop artists". His work adopts a flat and symbolic composition, linking traditional ethics and modern culture. “Red Wall” is a symbolic work of pop art, using the traditional woodcarving-illustration prints and stories, through the process of Pop, to imply the various meanings of contemporary private and secular life. Wei Guangqing includes the contradictions of tradition and modernity by using a language related to cartoons and comic strips. His color palette consists of strong, often complementary colors. The artist creates a historical-ethical Pop with regional significance and uses the age-old tradition as a metaphor about today’s world.

Ma Liuming 马六明 is a contemporary Chinese painter active in performance art. He is known most of all for his exploration of the power and poetry of public nudity in China, where such behavior was strictly forbidden. As a result, he has been the target of government censorship, unable to perform in his own country for most of his career.

Liu Ye is a Beijing-based contemporary Chinese painter known for his bright-hued paintings of childlike female figures, his favorite cartoon character Miffy the bunny and works inspired by Piet Mondrian. Liu Ye is part of a generation of artists who grew up during the Cultural Revolution. However, unlike most acclaimed Chinese contemporary art, his works have little political implications. Instead, he prefers to use a universal language to depict his inner world. His work has been exhibited extensively in China, Europe and the United States.

Wong Sau-ching (王守清) is a Hong Kong visual artist from the Art Of Nature International Company Limited.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shen Jingdong</span> Chinese artist

Shen Jingdong is a contemporary Chinese artist known for his paintings and sculptures of Chinese iconography. He currently lives in Beijing.

Zhao Yao is an artist in installations as well as performance, video and photography. He grew up in Sichuan and currently lives and works in Beijing.

Chen Ke is a Chinese artist. She currently lives and works in Beijing. Having participated in numerous international and domestic exhibitions, Chen Ke has worked in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture and fashion design. Chen Ke is recognized as the most representative artist of the New Generation of Cartoon of China.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emily Cheng</span> American painter

Emily Cheng is an American artist of Chinese ancestry. She is best known for large scale paintings with a center focus often employing expansive circular images... "radiantly colored, radially composed". She has won numerous awards including Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship, 2010, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, 1996, Yaddo Residency, 1995, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 1982–1983.

Painting for me, is the evidence of an inquiry…It is the postulation made physical….It is the wall that penetrates….It is the mind reminded. It is the hunch made vivid. It is the reworking of the familiar. It is the shadow of the unfamiliar. It is the acting out of desire. It is the probe of limits. It is the life imaged. It is the eye engaged. Painting is luxury bounded.

Li Huayi is a contemporary ink artist whose admiration for the monumental landscapes of the Northern Song dynasty with his training in both traditional Chinese ink and Western art, inspired him to create his own style of ink painting.

Stella Zhang is a Chinese contemporary artist whose practice ranges from painting to sculpture and installation. Zhang is notable for her strong feminist approach in art-making. Her work is described as "a statement for women’s power and identity," Zhang is exhibited world-wide and collected by public institutions such as the National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China, Copelouzos Family Art Museum, Athens, Greece; and Tan Shin Fine Arts Museum, Tokyo, Japan. There are seven monographs focusing on her work, published by Chinese Culture Foundation of San Francisco, Si Chuan Art Press, EDGE Gallery, JKD Gallery, and Galerie du Monde. She is a guest lecturer at Stanford University and also teaches at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.

References

  1. ↑ Coleman, S, Zhang Xiao Tao, from AsiaArtNow.com Archived April 23, 2010, at the Wayback Machine
  2. ↑ Franklin, J, An Entropic Vision Archived September 2, 2007, at the Wayback Machine , Shine Art Space Archived March 1, 2014, at the Wayback Machine , Shanghai
  3. ↑ Auction results from AskArt.com
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.