Zhang Xiaotao


Zhang Xiaotao, is a Chinese 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 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, and incorporating images of putrefaction and pollution.
His work Condom Series: Enlarged Props – Crystal And Fishes 2 sold for US$64,500 at Sotheby's Hong Kong in 2007.
Updated May 27，2018
Biography
Zhang Xiaotao 张小涛
Zhang Xiaotao was born in Hechuan, Chongqing, China in 1970 and graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 1996. In 2011, he co-founded the New Media Department of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute where he works as a Professor, and master's degree supervisor. In 2016, he completed his Phd thesis at Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, with Xu Bing as his Phd adviser. He lives and works in Beijing
Zhang Xiaotao's artworks are exhibited widely, both domestically and internationally, including the 55th Venice Biennale, Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, the 6th Moscow Biennale, Prague Biennial, Guangzhou Triennial, Chengdu Biennial, Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture, Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennial, Holland Film Festival, Tokyo International Animation Fair, Asia Animation Contest, London Saatchi Gallery, Museum of Art for the XXI Century, Luzern Art Museum, Albright Knox Gallery, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Florida Valencia Museum of Modern Arts, Bologna Museum of Modern Arts, Vienna Essl Museum, Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, Norway 3.14 Foundation, National Museum of Contemporary Art Korea, Seoul Museum of Art, Shanghai Art Museum, Chengdu Contemporary Art Museum, Guangdong Art Museum, He Xiangning Art Museum, Suzhou Jinji Lake Art Museum, Arthur M.Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University.
He is one of the active and outstanding cross-media artists in neo-painting and new media experimental animation in China's contemporary art. He is one of the directors of the 1st Shenzhen Biennial of Independent Animation. He always focuses on the torment and struggle of our souls that lies behind China's legendary modernization. This is a unique experience with both hope and destruction which is very complicated in China. He uses cross-media to concerns about the paradox between social change and personal spiritual history and attempts to convert the personal experiences into public experiences. The concept of epidemiology is both pathological and sociological, both individual and social. Each generation faces a different predicament, and he hopes to present these complex epidemiological reports. The Director of the 7th and 8th Kassel Documenta, the famous German Critics Manfred Schneckenburger considered him as a marvelous artist because of his research approach of infinitesimal narration.
Feature Documentaries were recorded by NHK Japan in 2004. He was awarded of the Prize of Young Artist 2008. The Italian Magazine Flash Art had an exclusive interview with him on the animation film Mist. Feature Documentaries were recorded by CCTV. He was awarded of the Best Technique Award in Asia 2011 and 2012. He had an exclusive interview with New York Times in Jan. 2016 – Nostalgia and Surrealism: The Modern China of Animation Artist Zhang Xiaotao. His works have been collected by museums, foundations, art centers and collectors at home and abroad.

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 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 The Best Technology Award of Asian Youth Animation Contest 2012, Guiyang, China
2011 The Best Technology Award of Asian Youth Animation Contest 2011, Guiyang, China
2010 Nomination of Reshaping History: China Art 2000-2009, Beijing, China
2009 Prize of Excellent Works of Chongqing Youth Art Biennial, Chongqing, China
2008 Young Artists Award of 2nd Critics Annual Exhibition, Beijing, China
1996 1st Prize of Mei Yuan Cup, Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts, Shenyang, China

Solo exhibitions

2016 Zhang Xiaotao: The Spring of Huangjueping, Pékin Fine Arts, Beijing, China
2014 Worlds of the Trichiliocosm,Wilfrid Israel Asian Art Museum, Wilfrid, Israel
In The Realm of Microcosmic, Pekin Fine Arts,Beijing,China
Plum Flower Patterns, white box art center,Beijing,China
Empty Shadow,Jin Ji Hu art, Museum,Suzhou, China
2013 Transition，Museum Of Contemporary Art Chengdu ，Chengdu ，China
2012 Spiritual Encoding, Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei, China
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 Archaeologyof Beijing University, Beijing, China
Desires without Limits, Dolores de Sierra Galería de Arte, Madrid, Spain
Night, Shanghai e-Arts, Shanghai, China
2006 Beautiful Imbroglio, He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen, China
2005 Dreamscapes, International Art 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 zhang Xiaotao solo exhibition, Tokyo Gallery, Japan
2000 Fabricated Images, Pacific Bridge Gallery，Oakland,U.S.A

Group exhibitions

;2015
Point to Asia- 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia
Chinese Contemporary Art Invitational Exhibition 2015, Ming Yuan Art Gallery, Shanghai, China
Chang Jiang International Image Biennale, Chang Jiang Art & Culture Club, Chongqing, China
Asian Media Art Festival, Art Gallery of Chung-Ang University, Soul, Korea
New Era – Created in China, Arhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus, Denmark
;2014
Liquid Culture- China & Korea New Media Art Exhibition, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea
The Visible and The Invisible- Video and Photography from China Today, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Florida, USA
Echo – Multidimensional Traditions of Chinese Contemporary Art Exhibition, Hamburg Art Museum, Hamburg, Germany
Translated Concussion—Chinese New Media Art Techniques and Practice since 2000,MOCA,Chengdu,China
;2013
China Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, Arsenal, Venice, Italy
Pure Views: New Painting from China, St. Monica Arts Center, Barcelona, Spain
;2012
Chinese animation since the 1930S，7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Queensland, Australia
Holland International Animation Film Festival, Holland Animation Film Foundation, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Roaming the World—Zhang xiaotao and Pierre Exhibition, Chengdu Contemporary Art Museum, Chengdu, China
Inward Gazes—Performance Art Documenta of China 2012, Macao Art Museum, Macao, China
;2011
Mountains and Rivers – Speechless Poem, Berne Art Museum, Berne, Switzerland
New Age: Australia-China International New Media Arts Exhibition, QUT Art Museum，Australia
Relationship: New Chinese Construction Art, Museum of Art for the XXI Century, Rome, Italy
;2010
Material and Code: Disciplinary Crossings of Cinema Studies and New Media, Chicago University, Chicago, USA
Beijing Time, Santiago de Compostela, Santiago, Spain
Heart—Forefront of Contemporary Architecture in China Exhibition, Vitra Design Museum, Weimar, Germany
Arena: A Post Boom in Beijing, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre, Hazelhurst, Australia
The Big Bang, White Rabbit Museum, Sydney, Australia
Pure Views: China New paintings, Louise Blouin Foundation, London, UK
;2009
Beijing Time, Casa Asia Matadero Madrid, Madrid, Spain
Ink Not Ink—Chinese Contemporary Ink Painting Exhibition, Drexel University Art Museum, Philadelphia, USA
Contemporary Art Rebirth of China, Palazzo Reale Museum, Milan, Italy
;2008
55 Days in Valencia, Valencia Museum of Modern Art, Valencia, Spain
Transgressive Body, TAPE Art Center, Berlin, Germany
The Revolution Continues, Saatchi Gallery, London, UK
Poetic Realism—A Reinterpretation to South of Yangtze River, Francisco Tomásy Valiente Art Center, Madrid, Spain
;2007
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
;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 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
;2004
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
;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
;2006
;2005
;2004
;2003
;2002
;2001
;2000