
Name the Newborn Daughter / Deal with Social Insurance and Household Registration /
My Son Has a Fever for a Week / Prepare for the Project at Suochengli Yantai / Buy 4 x 5 Colour Negative and Film 120 / Documentary Clip / Photograph Post-production / Visit the Exhibition at Create Spaces in A4 Art Museum / New Edition of Jiazazhi is Published / Eat Two Bowls of Beef Noodle / Prepare New works / Art Power / Mark Rothko: A Biography / Art History after Modernism / Change Diapers / Broad Band Renew / Damages of Melbourne Collectors’ Photograph / Drive to 190km/h on the Expressway to Chengdu after the Exhibition in Chongqing / Register for Vaccination Card / Look for New Studio/ Apply for Birth Certificate and Hospital Discharge / Photography Exhibition in Zhengzhou / Identity / Vehicle Annual Inspection / Eat Chuanchuan as Late Snake for Days / Know an Artist Who Looks the Same as Me / Deal with 25 Points of the Traffic Violation / Want to Hire an Assistant / Make an Artist Proof for Photograph / Arrange the Exhibition 403 Apples /
Photographer s and Artists / Pay for Credit Card / Buy a Digital Camera / Look for a Metalwork Factory for an Installation Artwork / Pay Estate Management Fee / Website Revision / Article for 10th Anniversary of Nuts / Exhibition at the End of Year in Hong Kong /
Adhere Porcelain Teeth at Dental Hospital / Buy 8 x 10 Instant Photographic Paper / Mobile Phone Screen is Broken
By Zhang Xiao
‘Name the newborn daughter…My son has a fever for a week…’, this bullet-point list is the start of Zhang Xiao‘s personal project in A Thousand Plateaus Art Space, recording his recent daily life and working progress, meanwhile, representing Zhang’s various identities. In fact, by applying certain materials, rearranging images and associating with words, Zhang employs the project So Many Things Are Going On to discuss the multiplicity of individual identity.
The colourful PVC flooring used in the project is the main material as Kang made of, in Zhang’s hometown Yantai. The mundane but once-familiar object in hometown experiences cropping, extracting, photographing, recombining and framing and finally transforms into artwork in somewhere other than hometown. As an art piece, it is unfamiliar to hometown fellows, so is for viewers from other places as a functional material. The dual strangeness corresponds to Zhang’s physical migration and identity transformation, in fact, also echoes to many aspects of the rapid development in China nowadays. The juxtaposition of photograph and material of colourful PVC flooring forms a vague distinction that is too subtle to notice. However, it maintains a significant metaphor for transition. The sense of blurry arising by mixed media reflects to his moving and status change, also the difficulties to tell the fake from truth in today’s society.
The personal project So Many Things Are Going On by Zhang Xiao is the first solo exhibition of A Thousand Plateaus Project Space 1000 +. The Gallery launches the project space to provide more experimental scenes for artists and allow them to be curators at the same time. There will be at least 5 projects every year.
Born in 1981 in Yantai city, Shandong province, China, Zhang Xiao graduated from the Department of Architecture and Design at Yantai University in 2005. Before becoming a photography artist in 2009, he was a photojournalist for Chongqing Morning Post. Zhang won the Three Shadows Photography Award in 2010 with ‘They’ series. He also received the second Hou Dengke Documentary Photography Award in 2009, The Photography Talent Award (France) in 2010 and the Prix HSBC pour la Photographie in 2011 with his ‘Coastline’ series. Zhang’s work has been widely exhibited in China and overseas in recent years. Zhang currently lives and works in Chengdu city, Sichuan province, China.
A Thousand Plateaus Art Space was founded in 2007 in Chengdu, China. It is a professional gallery committed to present and promote China’s contemporary art. Equipped with exhibition hall for artworks and collection and screening room for video data, it is mainly on researching, presenting and promoting outstanding works and experimental projects of China’s contemporary art and culture, actively carries out domestic and international cooperation projects.

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