With his work described as “the
fables of the social changes and future prospects” Chinese artist Zhang Xiaotao is a painter who has embraced the digital art of
video animation. Both examples of his work were on show at the Chinese Pavilion
at last year’s Venice Biennale.
His love of comics as a child coupled with the study of the Buddhist
and Taoist influenced martial arts and a near death experience by drowning are
personal influences that color his art. Living through the cultural transition
from the socialist collective ideals of the Cultural Revolution to the individualistic
concerns of a market economy likewise informs his art.
Zhang’s large paints from the early years of this century,
for which he is arguable best known, utilize both Western & Chinese painting
traditions to reflect on his immediate surroundings. “China is huge and
chaotic, and it makes you feel tiny and insignificant… I want to express human
desires in a materialistic society, people’s instinctive reactions, both physiological
and psychological, to living in this era,” he says in a 2002 Artist’s
Statement.
But these works are also informed with Zhang’s childhood memories
with their often watery connotations and meditations about the spiritual. “These
are magnified fragments of our absurd and indulgent materialistic life, and
they are also the instinctual misgivings and responses towards this society of
material desire,” he says.
In 2010 Zhang co-founded the Sichuan Fine Arts Academy’s New
Media Studies Department where he works as a professor. In his private practice
as an artist he now works with new media art production examining the paradox between social change and
personal spiritual history striving to transmit the personal experience into a
public one.
Three of Zhang’s full-length video animation works along
with photo stills from the works will be on show at Pékin Fine Arts until the 5th
of January.
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