Zhang Xiaotao was born on 1970 in Hechuan, Chongqing, China, he lives and works in Beijing and Chengdu, China. He is an artist full of enthusiasm and good at argument. He is so talkatively repelling that no one could plunge himself into the conversation you could also be able to read his articles about the paintings. 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 back 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.
This is Zhang’s first exhibit in the United States, accompanying a month-long residency at the Pacific Bridge Gallery, which last spring garnered attention for its controversial exhibition of Ho Chi Minh portraits. Zhang, who is 29, has a degree in oil painting and teaches it at Southwest Jiaotong University in Chengdu.Among Chinese artists, oil painting has caught on as a fashionable and innovative expression of Western energy. In the hands of a skillful painter like Zhang, it reflects 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. 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.