Pékin Fine Arts is pleased to host our first solo exhibit of artist Zhang Xiaotao. Zhang Xiaotao’s video animation works Sakya (2010-2011) and The Adventures of Liang Liang (2012-2013) were exhibited in the 55th Venice Biennale (June – Nov 2013), in the China National Pavilion’s group exhibit “Transfiguration” curated by Wang Chunchen, head of curatorial research at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum and adjunct curator at the Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University (the Broad MSU). Zhang Xiaotao graduated from the oil painting department of the Sichuan Fine Arts Academy, starting his career as an oil painter. He co-founded the Sichuan Fine Arts Academy’s New Media Studies Department in 2010 where he works today not only as professor advocating increased support for new media art, but also as pioneer artist working at the cutting edge of innovating with new media art production. Professor Zhang also organizes international academic and scholarly symposiums and exhibits in China’s art institutions and museums, focused on the topic of new media art studies. Zhang Xiatao is earning a doctoral degree from Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, with Xu Bing as his Phd advisor. Zhang Xiaotao lives and works in Chongqing and Beijing.
Zhang’s exhibit at Pékin Fine Arts is the first time all three of Zhang Xiatao’s full-length video animation works will be presented together in one venue, along with photo stills from the video works, with the aim of highlighting common themes throughout Zhang’s multi-media art practice.
In Sakya, (2010-2011) Zhang Xiaotao’s first video animation film, his focus is most direct, depicting the struggle to retain spirituality and religious devotion (Buddhism) within the context of China’s all consuming push to modernize. Using sci-fi stylized computer gaming 3-D video imagery, the artist attempts to illustrate meditative states of Tibetan Buddhism. The video’s imagery moves easily – and this is the crux of why it is disturbing – from computer software generated on-line gaming animation iconography to Buddhist sutra and ritualized prayer exercises. Sakya – and each of Zhang’s videos since - seek to prove, like an experiment in human behavioral science, that all experiences whether gaming or meditative exist simultaneously, with equal meaning, intersecting and regenerating each other in perpetuity, at once both ancient and modern.
In The Adventures of Liang Liang (2013), the artist looks to the language of a child for spiritual meaning, literally animating his son’s dra- wings, with the aim of bridging the gap between father and son/adult and child, to illustrate the multi-layered, multi-spatial understan- dings and communications in every day existence.
Finally, in the most recent, Three Thousand Worlds (2014), Zhang Xiaotao returns to his Buddhist questioning, experimenting with contem- porary visualization of the Buddhist notion of orientation of the self. A self, according to Buddhist precepts, that exists at once in at least three realms or the “three thousand worlds”, a multi-level, multi-spatial existence of heart and universe as one. According to Zhang, “Our ancient people had a simple consciousness of relativity, that there is a kind of superior meaning between the macroscopic and the microcosmic, and there is a channel between “heart” and “yu zhou(the universe)”, so the heart is literally connected to the “yu zhou”. “Yu” refers to the world around us while “zhou” the past, present and future. The “yu zhou” is a collective concept of time and space. Our ancient people’s views of time and space possess similarities to modern ideas about the universe and the study of quantum physics. Each universe has its independent time and space. Quantum physics helps us to observe the existence of a multi-layered, multi-dimensional universe as well as a personal state of being in that universe....”
Zhang’s practice today relies heavily on contemporary visual language and specifically video animation software, to reconcile fundam- ental and traditional Buddhist precepts with modern life and its material demands. His personal exploration and struggle to find meaning is rendered as public art world display, through the deceptively “easy” and “accessible” world of video gaming software iconography. Implicitly positing a new question: “Indeed, does computer (animation) software, after all, help to unlock questions of the meaning of one’s existence?”
