Curator: Milia Xin BI
Zhang Zipiao I come to know via the canvas has no difference from the one you do. The torrential brushwork she strokes holds many messages, with power, earnest and caprice being part of them. It is apparent that she is very young, yet already being capable enough of bringing about either disaster or ecstasy. This I conclude is the sexy spirit of her.
My first question out of curiosity is that how many lines obey her will, having been steadily controlled in a seemingly presumptuous composition. The process of visual construction resembles the Big Bang, where the inspirational fragments generated through the explosion are still burning hot, which then gives way to the supernova as the seed of the brand new pictorial composition. It ought to be noted that without excellent operational capacity, the forming and flowing composition is hard-pressed to develop into a new order. Zhang Zipiao has a pair of mature hands of painter that are able to get a grip on the fast changing supernova among the weightless Big Bang. She masters the vigor of lines with appropriate consideration so that the composition will not be destructed by her overwhelming passion. She generates a contrast of texture through the interaction between lines and colors, and then opens up a subtle three-dimensional space via the flat two-dimension. Meanwhile, she gives thought to how regional colors should be matched either provocatively or harmoniously, arranges collision in details and discusses beauty in contradiction.
One can hardly read from Zhang Zipiao’s painting the plot of literature. Instead, it reflects the “tension” transformed from her strong spirit. She gives up specific content of painting and turns to employ pure painting language including lines, spots, blocks and composition to express emotion, sensation and rhythm of the forming process of supernova. The“tension”does not come from nowhere. Before the Big Bang, it stems from information online, TV program, life in Chicago, the awkward stage of adolescence and young adulthood, critique and satire, dotage and global capitalism. The fact of being an artist is more important than the content of an artwork in that it is the body, the unique being that acts as the core of painting creation.
Dilles Deleuze describes painting as the only one among all the art forms that integrates the self-catastrophe into its inner being with inevitability and hysteria, which enables it a kind of art that escapes to the future. Artist Zhang Zipiao is here to be found in her canvas.
