Through loaded and nuanced abstractions that reflect upon social media culture as well as personal experience, emerging Shanghai-based artist Zhang Zipiao's work explores shifting modern social standards and the politics of representation. In 2019, Zipiao was included in the art list for Forbes' 30 Under 30 Asia.
Read MoreBorn in Beijing in 1993, Zipiao's artistic aspirations were encouraged from an early age by her semi-estranged father, who was also a painter. She studied in the United States, completing a BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2012, followed by an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015.
At the Art Institute of Chicago, she encountered and was inspired by works such as Francis Bacon's Figure with Meat (1954). Zipiao's art draws from Bacon and other prominent artists including Willem de Kooning, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Jenny Saville.
Returning to China after her studies Zipiao now lives and works in Beijing.
Zhang Zipiao's paintings are made with bold sweeping, gestural brushstrokes, accompanied by graphic linework and sharp contrasting colours. Filled with irreverent visual puns and metaphors, the large-scale artworks reference tropes of Internet culture, everyday objects, and meditations on her own body and mind.
Several of Zipaio's pieces, as showcased in the 2019 solo show Cutthroat Kitchen at MINE PROJECT in Hong Kong, reference fruit and other food items. These include paintings like Passion Fruit (2018), Grapefruit (2018), Mango (2018), and Apple Core 02 (2019) where fruits are cut open and their interior structure revealed.
Zipaio uses this exposure or denuding, commonplace in the kitchen, as a visual metaphor. While some fruits are left whole and 'filled with the promise of life', others are opened and fragile through their exposure, symbolising the dangers of being exposed to the world.
Zipiao's 'Position' series (2019–20) explores the 'idealised female body' that has been a common subject across the history of art. Zipiao challenges this objectification by taking the bodily form and distorting it. Bold brushstrokes and contrasting tones present an association of flesh indistinguishable of gender. In works such as Position 4 (2019) and Meat Mate 2 (2020), the abstracted swarm of flesh is structured around exposed skeletal frames.
The visual tension in these works explore the autonomy and subjection of women in body but also in mind. In later works like Heart 03 (2021), Zipiao turns the figure into abstract organs transforming them into something that is both harmonious yet bloody and violent.
Zipiao's florally-themed series such as the blooming 'Lily' ( 2020), 'Calailly' (2020), 'Floral Field' (2020), and 'Peony' (2020–21) bear some resemblance to Georgia O'Keeffe's flower paintings. Capturing moments of bud and blossom in her loose semi-abstract expressive style, the artist heightens the emotional intensity the flowers' transient bloom as it seemingly spills out beyond the canvas.
Zipiao projects human physical and mental experiences onto these flowers, creating a visual metaphor for life's struggles, joy, and ecstasy in one.
Some of Zipiao's larger works to date, the 'Battlefield' paintings (2021), reflect on what has been described as 'the aesthetics of violence'. Tumultuous rolling waves of red dominate the picture plane, clashing and coalescing in conflict. The works evoke the violent tumolt and battlefield of modern life.
Zhang Zipiao has shown in both solo exhibition and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include Zhang Zipiao, Long Museum, Shanghai (2022); Zhang Zipiao: Heart of Anchor, Salon 94, New York (2021); The Ultimate Moist!, White Space, Beijing (2018); Sexy Hysteria, Ying Space, Beijing (2015).
Group exhibitions include Eternal Seasons, LGDR, Hong Kong (2022); Metal, Wood, Water, Fire, and Earth, Pace Palo Alto, Palo Alto CA (2021); In the Name of Flower, Pearl Art Museum, Shanghai (2020); Déjà vu: Painting as the Art of Signification, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2018).
Zhang Zipiao's Instagram can be found here.
Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2022
