Zhang
Xiaotao was born in Hechuan, Sichuan in 1970. He graduated from the oilpainting
department of the prestigious Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 1996 and
went on to become a lecturer at the Southwest Jiaotong University in Chengdu.
Kristianna Bertelsen describes Zhang's works from his show at the Pacific
Bridge Gallery in Oakland
SWIMMING
TO CHINA
Walking into Zhang Xiaotao's "A Joyful Time," where huge oil
and watercolor paintings invite viewers into a bright underwater world
of copulating frogs and intertwined human forms, the reaction "elated
and free" comes to mind. Amphibious creatures float unencumbered
in washes of blue, green, and orange paint, their outlines making whimsical,
eye-pleasing shapes. So it is with great surprise that one learns of the
artist's background-that he nearly drowned as a child and is afraid of
water, and that he comes from a country whose reproductive policies are
heavy-handed and punitive.
In the hands Zhang, oil paint is made to reflect the character of an ancient
culture while embracing modern themes and colors. Fish, snakes, human
faces, beer mugs, condoms-these repeating elements 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 abound
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 habitué.
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 these 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 bedsheet.
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 silkscreening,
a mass-production technique that Warhol adopted in the early '60s.
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.
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