Zhang Xiaotao

Near death experiences

When Xiaotao was 7 he visited the shore of the powerful Yangtze River, where he was playing 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 drown 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.

Painting style

Xiaotao uses sexually explicit material in his works for a subtle yet explosive effect. Xiaotao belongs to a generation of Chinese artists that have been able to paint with much freedom. Xiaotao's use of pattern and decorative elements in his work enhance the power of the painting's obscenity and political subtext. Xiaotao combines conceptual and political features in his work while portraying a delicate irony as well.

"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

2009 Chongqing Youth Art Biennial Prize for outstanding works, Chongqing 2008 2nd Critics Annual, Young Artist of the Year Prize, Beijing 1996 Lu Xun Fine Arts Institute, Mei Yuan Cup, First Prize, Shengyang

Solo exhibitions

Group exhibitions

Starting From Southwest, Guangdong Art Museum, Guangzhou, China Chinese Whisper, Osage kwun tong, Hong Kong New Painting from Southwest China, K gallery, Chengdu, China From New Figurative image to New Painting, Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing, China 3 Langue 3 Colors, UM Gallery, Seoul, Korean 3rd Guiyang Art Biennale, Guiyang Art Museum, Guizhou, China The Art of Seduction—From Schiele to Warhol, Minoritenkloster Tulln, Austria

Jiang Hu, Jack Tilton Gallery, New York City Skin, Shenzhen Art Museum, Shenzhen

Internal injuries, Marella arte contemporanea, Beijing Poetic Realism : A reinterpretation of Jiangnan, RCM Art Museum, Nanjing Enchanting Images of a Changing World, Vienna Essl Museum, Austria Unclear and Cleamess, Heyri Art Foundation, Korean The Road map of Painting 2, Beijing Tokyo Art Projects Beijing Varied Images, Shanghai art museum

China Contemporary painting, Fondazione Carisbo, Italy 2nd Prague Biennial, Prague, National Gallery Veletrzni Palac, Prague 2nd Triennial of Chinese Arts, Nanjing Art Museum Nanjing 2nd Chengdu Biennial, the Modern Art Museum, Chengdu Young Chinese Contemporary art, Hangar-7, Austria China Contemporary Painting, APalazzo Bricherasio, Torino, Italy

Forbidden Senses ? – Sensuality In Contemporary Chinese Art Espace Culturel François Mitterrand, Périgueux, France China Today Painting “ ---Infeld-Haus der Kulturen, Vienna, Austria China's photographic painting, China Art seasons, Beijing Officina Asia, Galleria d’Arte Modema. Bologna, Italy New Perspectives in Chinese Painting, Marella arte contemporanea, Milano, Italy Artificial Happiness “ RMIT Museum Melbourne, Australia Live in Chengdu, Shenzhen Art Museum, Shenzhen

left hand -right Hand, 798 Space Beijing Composite picture of Asian, Hong Kong Art Museum Image of image, Shenzhen Art Museum. Shenzhen Illusory, Museun63, Hong Kong. Guangdong art Museum links between two points, Tokyo gallery Japan

Dream, Chinese contemporary Art. CAC. Manchester

Korean Contemporary Art Festival. Seoul Art Center Korean

Triennial of Chinese Arts, Guangzhou Art Museum Beijing Afloat, Beijing Tokyo Art Projects Beijing

Up-Down-Right-Left, -the Feminism etc., the Modern Art Museum, Chengdu Dream, Chinese contemporary art, Atlantic’s Gallery, London Youth in transition, He xiangning Art Museum Shenzhen

Time of Reviving, 2000 Contemporary Art Exhibition of China, Upriver Gallery, Chengdu Between the Dreams and the Picturesque Meaning, Vienna Between 1900 And 2000, Schloss Cappenberg, Deutschland

'99 Academic Exhibition, Upriver Gallery, Chengdu, China

Urban Personality and Contemporary Art, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, China

Personal Experience Show, Art Museum of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Chongqing, China

Selected exhibitions

Individual pieces of work