The Whitebox Art Center has the honor to announce that Zhang Xudong’s solo exhibition : Flowers out of theslough, curated by Du Xiyun will be opened on 12th January 2019. More than 10 pieces of ZHANG Xudong's latest creations will be presented. This is the second cooperation between the artisit and the Whitebox Art Center after the exhibition ‘Differential Eroticism’.

In terms of artistic expression, Zhang Xudong has always had a close relationship with "Expressionism", which is also the logo for his works. He’s adept at using his daily life experience as a medium, taking his own emotions as samples, and publicizing them in an artistic way. In recent years, the artist goes beyond himself and spends more and more time in painting. As a result of removing all kinds of psychological fetters, his numerous painting practices give rise to a perfect control of artistic language. The more he paints, the more he finds the real self ; The more he finds the real self, the more easily he forgets the material world ; The more easily he forgets the material world, the more smoothly his daily experience sheds on a 2D canvas. When encountering difficulties, the artist tends to ruin what is painted, and covers the canvas with new situation generated from the ruining process. Painting is a trial and error experiment, which brings the artist unexpected effects after several covering process and thus pulls out his dormant unconscious yet mysterious energy.

The latest works in this exhibition continue the expressive language style of Zhang xudong's oil paintings. Based on desire and human nature, the works explore several aspects of desire and discuss the essence of human nature. Unlike previous works, these new pieces have less rational design and are more unfettered, that is, the‘action paintings’. In the painting process, the artist discovered and created images in the dual opening of heart and language, painting, smearing, dripping and splashing instantly, capturing and freezing every moment of what he saw and what he dreamt. There are plenty of occasional occasions in discovering and creating, for instance, a critical state when the brain is blank yet the heart beats clearly. At this moment, painting in front ofthe canvas, the artist feels unexpectedly more sensitive heartbeats and calls out the latent consciousness in dealing with the relationship between brushes, pigments, and canvases. In Zhang Xudong's recent works, this kind of ‘material evidence’ increases obviously, and becomes the catalyst and opportunity when mobilizing the audience's new feelings and interacting with their new survival experience. 

Zhang Xudong has seen lots of sloughs in this world and releases them into his paintings, where he uses women, flowers, mountains and other beautiful images to build his own "forest of symbols". He enjoys himself in painting, smearing, dripping and splashing. he expresses his real experience and understanding of the world when using a touch of brush to guide the human nature in his paintings. At this moment, the unexpected triumphs over the expected.