Dreamlike and disturbing, seductive, sweet and fierce images composed of natural elements, animals, bodily fluids, symbolic objects and autobiographical references. At Palazzo Merulana, home of the Fondazione Elena e Claudio Cerasi, 18 works recount the world of one of the most refined interpreters of contemporary Chinese art. The exhibition, curated by art historian Andrea Romoli Barberini, is an immersive journey into the visual and conceptual universe of Zhang Xiaotao, already known in Italy for his participation in the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013.
Characterised by an intense and layered aesthetic, the works on display mix tradition and innovation, pictorial language and technological experimentation, in a constant dialogue between East and West, the intimate and the universal. Through painting and the technique of digital animation, Zhang Xiaotao offers us his profound reflections through images on the concepts of time, space, nature, spirituality and the human condition, without neglecting the traumas, fears and collective neuroses that mark our era. Zhang Xiaotao’s narration through images is based on facts and situations experienced in different times and places that resonate in the artist’s mind as “echoes of time”, taking on an emblematic character.
In a dense web of cross-references and interweaving of content, the individual works can establish relationships and correspondences among themselves, like so many pieces of a mosaic that compose, even in the absence of a narrative unity of time and place, a unique and totalizing work.
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