The small paintings and sculptures created by Zhang Jianqiang embody his great efforts in recent years. From a realist perspective, he chose to express his melancholy feelings towards life by depicting persons, objects and scenes abandoned by traditional aesthetics.

Petition Letters 32x23cm  piece 2008 oil on canvas

His solo exhibition will show the six series of works by Zhang, including Petition Letters, Song Wei, Landscape, Transient as Smoke, Rotten · Splendor and Vermilion. When the works of petition letters was unfolded before our eyes, we could hardly image that the petition letter collected by Zhang which would most likely ended up being discarded as rubbish of the offices, although the letters contained all the hopes of their writers. Zhang Jiangqiang snatched and froze a most real but sad scene of today's society represented by these letters. Vermilion was created by Zhang Jianqiang in 2006. He mixed vermilion color used in Chinese ink painting in water, froze the water to ice cubes and carved these cubes into sculptures of his own head. Then he put the sculptures on 100 pieces of Chinese Xuan paper and let them melt for one day and one night. As the water left different marks on each of these 100 pieces of paper, the 100 patterns were different from one another. The series of Song Wei described the appearance and expression of phrenetic and drunk Song Wei who once a restaurant tycoon in Beijing and abandoned by the society at last.

In the works of Transient as Smoke, the discarded cigarette ends was created a sculpture, and was piled up in the locale. Meanwhile, the cigarette case was painted into the oil paintings, and was displayed orderly. In his artworks simplified by his Minus Principal, we saw the crash of the past and the present, the collision of ideal and reality, and a real China.