Zhang Xiaotao

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Zhang Xiaotao
Born 1970 (age 43–44)
Hechuan, Chongqing, China

Zhang Xiaotao was born in 1970 in Hechuan, Chongqing, China. He is a painter based in Beijing and Chengdu.

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 1996-2009. 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 Sothebys Hong Kong in 2007. [3]

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

  • 2011　Sakya , White box museum of art, Beijing，China
  • 2010　Epidemiology，Guangdong Museum of Art，Guangzhou，China
  • 2008　Microscopic Narration ，Iberia Center for Contemporary Art ，Beijing,China
  • 2007　Rebirth, Arthur M.Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University, Beijing, China
  • Desires without Limits, Dolores de Sierra Galería de Arte, Madrid, Spain
  • 2006　Beautiful Imbroglio, He Xiangning Art Museum Shenzhen, China
  • 2005　Dreamscapes, Foundation 3.14 Bergen, Norway
  • 　　　 Dream Factory•Rubbish Heap, Tokyo Gallery, Japan
  • 　　　 Dreamscapes, M.K.Ciulionis Nat. Museum of Art, Kaunas, Lithuania
  • 2004　Dream Factory﹒Rubbish Heap, Beijing Tokyo Art Projects, China
  • 2003　Materialistic Decay, Akie Aricchi Art Contemporary Gallery, Paris, France
  • 2002　Desire, Kunst Akademie Muenster, Germany
  • 2001　Flowers in the Dream, Tokyo Gallery, Japan
  • 2000　Fabricated Images, Pacific Bridge Gallery, Oakland, U.S.A.

Group exhibitions

2007

Starting From Southwest, Guangdong Art Museum, Guangzhou, China Chinese Whisper, Osage kwun tong, Hongkong 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

2006

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

2005

China Contemporary painting, Fondazione Cassa Di Risparmioin Bologna, 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

2004

Forbidden Senses ? – Sensuality In Contemporary Chinese Art Espace Culturel François Mitterrand ,Perigueux,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

2003

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

2002

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

2001

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

2000

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

1999

'99 Academic Exhibition, Upriver Gallery, Chengdu, China

1997

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

1996

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

Selected exhibitions

2007
  • Three Languages Three Colors, UM Gallery, Korea
2006
  • Jiang Hu, Jack Tilton Gallery, New York, U.S.A.
  • Unclear and Cleanness, Heyri Art Foundation, Korea
  • Beautiful Imbroglio, He Xiang Ning Art Museum, Shenzhen, China (solo)
2005
  • Dreamscapes, Foundation3, 14 Bergen, Norway (solo)
  • Dream Factory - Rubbish heap, Tokyo Gallery, Japan (solo)
  • 2nd Prague Biennial, Prague, National Gallery Veletrzni Palac, Prague, Czech Republic
  • 2nd Triennial of Chinese Arts, Nanjing Art Museum, Nanjing, China
2004
  • Officinal Asia, Galleria d’Arte Modema, Bologna, Italy
  • New Perspectives in Chinese Painting, Marella arte contemporanea, Milan, Italy
2003
  • Materialistic Decay, Gallery Akie Aricchi Art Contemporary, Paris, France (solo)
2002
  • Desire, Kunstakademie Muenster, Germany (solo)
  • Triennial of Chinese Arts, Guangzhou Art Museum, China
2001
  • Flowers in the dream, Tokyo Gallery, Japan (solo)
2000
  • Joyful Time, Gallery Akie Aricchi Art Contemporary, Paris, France (solo)
  • Fabricated Images, Pacific Bridge Gallery, Oakland, U.S.A (solo)
  • Joyful Time, Gallery Hartmann, Munich, Germany (solo)

Individual pieces of work

  • Xiaotao's painting titled "Enlarged prop - Bird," which is a dreamy looking painting of an emaciated looking bird attempting to feed or analyzing some sort of nest looking thing. Xiaotao emphasises lose detail here which invokes the dreamy feel. This painting is estimated to be priced around $250,000 USD.
  • Another painting called "Fictioned Images No. 2" by Xiaotao, which is priced in the range of $100,000 USD, is a painting of a man looking through a glass mug. The glass mug distorts the man's face as he analyzes the glass. This painting also has Xiaotao's signature red splotches.
  • Xiaotao's painting named "Crystal Condom" shows a yellow and a purple condom almost floating in the air in front of a blue background. This painting's price is estimated to be worth about $85,000 USD.

References

  1. ↑ Coleman, S, Zhang Xiao Tao, from AsiaArtNow.com
  2. ↑ Franklin, J, An Entropic Vision, Shine Art Space, Shanghai
  3. ↑ Auction results from AskArt.com

External links

  • Article by Feng Boyi on Zhang Xiaotao
  • Images, biography and texts about Zhang Xiaotao from the Saatchi Gallery
  • by Kristianna Bertelsen on Zhang Xiaotao
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