zhang xiaotao's art workI have seen the works by Zhang Xiaotao for three times during the two years from 1996 to early 1999. But the styles in each time have not been remained the same. At the Exhibition of Personal Experience held in Chongqing in May 1996, his works were basically the Chinese copies of the Expressionist touch represented by Max Beckmann though his works were smart and steady, which somewhat differed from his bashful characters. When I went to Chengdu again in 1997, Zhang Xiaotao had been an instructor at Southwestern Jiaotong University. At his studio I saw the group of paintings he called as "Honey Wedding Dress". It's obvious that his works had been turning from the stylized to a process of conceptual thinking. There have been more things personal in the language expressed in those works. But unfortunately the images processed and his way were over-approaching the fashions like the " vulgarly gaudy" and "cartoon", his personal originality was somewhat weakened from certain aspect. Early this year when I went Chengdu again for visiting the Exhibition of Visual Force, to my surprise Zhang Xiaotao created a series of works called " Happy Time". It is these works that have thoroughly changed my previous impression of Zhang Xiaotao's art. zhang xiaotao,untital,oil painting,2007In the Exhibition of Visual Force, I classify Zhang Xiaotao into this kind of artists who "explore the potential energy out of the images to the full play by mobilizing, altering and deepening the text attribute and meaningful patterns so as to new establish the visual narrative modes". The basis for such a classification is exactly the works. The fundamental language structure in those works by Zhang Xiaotao is obviously the New Expressionist, particularly approaching the expressionist tradition represented by Sigmer Polke, David Salla and Martine Kippenberger. The image process of mixed technique and approach has been adopted in these works. Although such methods have been used in the works entitled "Honey Wedding Dress", in the "Happy Time", however, these methods are really rich in visual effects and historical tension which are rally of expressions. In the works of "Happy Time", the visual images with different or even opposite meaning patterns are blended in the pictures by non-organic way: strange beasts in prehistoric ages, pornographic engraving, figures in wedding dresses, various aquatic animals and even demons of Marc Chagall's type. All these have formed a fantastic effect of metaphor of ecology, anthropology as well as folklore. Within a given visual way, every source of image has left afar from its language context and entered the meaningful constitution set by the artist. Against the "flippant color", the pop way of multi arrangement of pornographic images, the freehand brushwork of green china ware with modeling space of expression and the multi-layered transparent skill in incredible arrangement have created for the works a comprehensive atmosphere of depth. zhang xiaotao's art workIt should be mentioned that the blending approach of mixed images is originated from the pop way of Robert Rauschenberg. In the art of Pop, such method is adopted for ready-made image structure without meaning. But in the new expressionist paintings by Polke and Salla, these blending mixtures are of obvious symbolic allegory connoting some sociological meaning. For example, in Salla's works some abstract visual factors like ear, naked bodies and some different natured images texts like miner and ore, pornography and myth are all rich in dramatic and metaphorical color. As H. H. Anashen describes, Salla's is to "express a grieved, fragmental and broken time at the end of the century with marvelous definiteness and literary grace." Therefore I think this new expressionist visual approach adopted by Zhang Xiaotao in his works is also to create a visual sense of metaphor. On one hand he makes use of vulgar and popular images, both ancient and modern and on the other hand, he tries to make them free from the "plane" narrative logic so as to help those images into a contradictory and dramatic state and bring about a new socialized meaning. In his tableau an introspecting and analyzing making is constituted by abnormal combination of various visual factors, the historic and present, graceful and vulgar, the transcendental and sensational. They are visualized rather than the non-imaged, absurd but rational. The purpose of it is probably to establish a new visual introspective logic. "What I feel interested in lies in the misreading of the tradition and also the surface life today. It would be beneficial for expressing my prolonged thought as to consume both tradition and the contemporary as a source and symbol, making the language and question for study paradoxed, particularly the choice of destroying signs with nameless eroding watermark and blood. In the hallow life throughout the shallow but joyful life centuries long, we have been in fact suffering the shapeless eroding and hurting...It is to turn the bitter and harmful into beautiful pictures with touch appeal by eroding that has become the meaning I want to express in my works. Carrying forward in the depth of visual sense!"(Zhang Xiaotao The Beautiful and Touching Eroding---the Personal Discourse Approach in Times.)The years of 1990s are not only the time extremely rich in image production but also the time in which the power and opportunity dominate and control images, when the interpretation of images has been involved with large amount of popularized theory of sociology and instrument. Various fashionable image modes either "resist" the old ideology in pictures or peddle the folklore tradition in decoration. This has made the image creation in contemporary Chinese art being farther away from its due object---the creation of visual force. Toward the end of 1990s, however, we feel optimistic to witness a group of younger artists who have begun to relocate both the function and value of art. They demand that images and pictures get free from the functional appendage of various fabricate culture, society as well as political proposition. They demand that they carry out their individual creation for images with an attitude of non-trend, non-theme and non-conception. I call this tendency as "visual autonomy" or "visual force", which is the critical reaction to the art ecology in paramount power and function. In Zhang Xiaotao's works, his correspondence and talks with me as well as his own writings, I have been experienced such demands. He calls his creation as an establishment of "personal way of discourse" and just like me, he gives a snort of contempt over those who play up to the collectivism for fashion and peep the power. It is in him and his art fellows that I have seen a power for recovering the independence in contemporary Chinese art.