Zhang Xiao

Zhang Xiao’s latest work Karaoke is comprised by seven old Karaoke VHS tapes from the 1990s. The artist extracted the most memorable scene from each Karaoke tape and used the frame as the label for the tape. In addition, he extracted parts of each of the seven Karaoke soundtracks which, when played simultaneously, weave a sonic landscape that reverberates with the past. “In an era isolated from excessive information, a box of cassette tape once carried a lot for us. The seemingly outdated frames and sound are mixed to revitalize the once best moments for us,” Zhang says.

Since there is a dream (2016) presents fragments of a physical, social and cultural landscape that shifts and blurs in the mind of the mass as well as the artist. A photograph of a Tiananmen Square replica, taken by Zhang in his hometown, was installed onto souvenir wall clocks made for two long-time popular CCTV shows. The installation evokes many Chinese people’s dreams of grandeur that are symbolised by appearing on TV or having a photograph of themselves taken at Tiananmen Square. While these dreams have lost some of their glory through the eras, Zhang’s work highlights the remnants of such dreams that many Chinese still hold on to and their essential fakeness.

The series is a set of instant film photographic works about his hometown, i.e. Yantai in Shandong province. The artist first copied images of landscapes and objects taken in his hometown on instant film materials, before lifting the image-bearing emulsion from the instant film and manually transferring it onto a paper. The black and white photocollage was therefore created through a delicate process of detachment and reassembly that echoes Zhang’s relationship with his hometown.

This mixed media series draws on Zhang’s recollection of watching TV and films on VHS during his childhood, a symbol of luxury in China in the 1990s. The artist selected 6 of his favourite films and TV shows from the 1980s-1990s, and made a screen capture of the most notable scene in each film or show for the label for the VHS tape. The film soundtracks are played simultaneously alongside the exhibit, weaving an intricate web of sounds that denote the re-creation of the bygone eras.

These two series mark a humorous tribute to the once popular practice of “New Photography” in the rural villages of Northern China. Photo editors, whom the artist calls “travelling folk artists of image”, roamed the villages with their notebook computers and created composite portraits for the villagers. In enlarging these old photos into near life-sized portraits, Zhang resurrects the sense of aesthetics,

In the series, Zhang travelled the 18,000 kilometres of coastline of China to photograph the ordinary people’s circumstances in the most developed areas of China. His images of seaside landscape are often infiltrated with bizarre artificial objects or constructions, with people performing different types of random activities. Zhang received the Prix HSBC pour la Photographie in 2011, The Photography Talent Awards (France) in 2010, and the second Hou Dengke Documentary Photography Award in 2009 with this series.

They series (2006-2008) won Zhang the Three Shadows Photography Award in 2010 which first gained him international attention. Taken in Chongqing, the biggest and fastest-growing city in China, the characters in They are the ordinary people in daily life – they carry out all kinds of mundane activities in public venues. In the images, these ordinary people seem departed from reality and entered a performance state. The images perhaps reveal the loss of balance and normality caused by the rapid development of modern Chinese society.