You Yi: Image Carnival and Temporal-Spatial Alienation — Zhang Zhaoying's Creative Logic and Epochal Translation

By You Yi

According to the linear logic of art-historical writing, the path from tradition to contemporaneity is inevitably one of the “avant-garde” continuously replacing the “rearguard.” However, as early as the 1980s, Western art historians warned of the blind spots and misinterpretations inherent in such an understanding of artistic development. The overlapping succession of artistic concepts necessarily reflects profound changes in social life, civilizational patterns, economic models, and lifestyles. The simple lexical shift from “monism” to “pluralism” implies that today we are not only capable of appreciating the desiccated brushstrokes and ink-wash tonalities of the Chinese sensibility, as seen in styles like “clear and distant streams and mountains,” but can also comprehend the significance of coexisting differences within more distant and unfamiliar civilizations. Therefore, when we reflect on the ecology of Chinese contemporary art, we might better understand those epochal translations embedded within artists' personalized creations. Their images inevitably carry the informational codes of this ongoing process; that is, the works of artists are their multifaceted understanding of the era, society, the world, and their own existence.

Various achievements in the translation field during the 1980s nourished avant-garde figures born in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. They devoured the humid air of political and creative freedom, forming schools repeatedly memorialized by art history through collective gatherings. Unlike the previous generation of artists, who experienced material scarcity and spiritual regret during their formative years, artists born in the 1980s and 90s began absorbing explosive epochal nutrients—high in sugar and energy—from childhood. They wore brand-name clothing adorned with various Western trendy symbols, watering their tender years with hamburgers and cola. The modern art education received by this generation of young artists can even be traced back to the images from various childhood video programs, readily available picture-book magazines, and advertisements in the physical environment. Most of them, by middle school or even earlier, were already navigating life's course in preparation for college entrance exams. Disciplined systematic education endowed them with solid modeling skills, and the selection mechanisms of art academies were the artistic standards most familiar to them during adolescence. Yet, several years after graduation, this foundational framework did not become a so-called inertial constraint. Instead, each embarked on their own arbitrary image logic and linguistic system. Consequently, the works we see from them are both representational and abstract; they value rationality yet alter time and space; they emphasize pure form yet do not refuse narrative. They can no longer even be signified by any past academic terminology from art history. Instead, they propose a new understanding of creative logic: arbitrarily editing, cropping, exaggerating, and transforming any image of interest to dissolve the established meanings, expressing the informational semantics and epochal sensibilities of the images.

Oriental Tales—Art Island 2024-2025 Oil on canvas 400×140cm

Artist Zhang Zhaoying, born after 1985, is precisely a representative case of this generation of young creators. His life, learning experiences, and understanding of the contemporary reflect the pervasive liberal air of the 80s and 90s, while also hinting at the globalized art landscape that needs redefinition in the digital age. New technologies like ChatGPT and other forms of Open AI are inevitable products of the networked era. Since the early 2000s, the internet has gradually transitioned from large desktop computers to today's micro-sized handheld terminals. Even the cities of our daily lives are filled with a bizarre world composed of various digital information screens. Everyone's physical time might be experiencing this: moments ago, one might have been browsing historical landscapes (informational views) of the Italian Renaissance; after swiping away, one might be surprised to find humanoid robots attempting to interact with human life. An hour ago, we might have been in Shanghai; the next moment, perhaps flying to another city. Surreal landscapes seem to have become the realistic perception of concrete time and space. It is not difficult to understand that the era experienced by Zhang Zhaoying and his peers, with its information volume, is not at all exaggeratedly described as “explosive.” The myriad images between the blinks of an eye converge in the occipital nerves of young people, and after countless twists and turns of sedimentation, constitute their epochal senses. Therefore, Zhang Zhaoying's works display the trendiest industrial products of the moment while also revealing cultural symbols that should belong to the Middle Ages. Whether film stills, famous works by celebrities, technology, or nature, all are interwoven and juxtaposed on canvases of varying sizes, diffusing boundless informational expression within bounded areas. Compared to merely using single image elements in creation, Zhang Zhaoying constructs a carefully selected, multi-typological, folded carnival of images.

Oriental Tales—Kung Fu 2024-2025  Oil on canvas Painting 385×200cm

Starting from the Titan's Feast series created by Zhang Zhaoying in 2013, to the Detonate, One News a Day series during his study abroad in Belgium, and then to the One Small Theater a Dayseries, the Lifelong Learning series, and the Lifelong Beauty series, although he has also experimented with some non-painting media (for instance, the installation *24-Hour Art History*used photoelectric materials), regardless of the form adopted, the image-creation logic of his works has remained consistent. Rich modeling, mysterious spaces, saturated colors, complex narrative logic, grotesque facial expressions, and nonsensical volumes are among the most common artistic tropes in Zhang Zhaoying's creations. The evolution of art from literary narrative to aesthetic purification, and then back to narrative again, is a long but purposeful journey. Within those contemporary narrative images (even if this narrativity follows an unconventional logic), the artist, with keen observation of reality and abstract literary editing ability, assumes the role of a director on the edge-limited blank canvas. He orchestrates a complex, interwoven structure of lighting (chiaroscuro), color, positioning, setting, and modeling to form an image sonata. The audience browses the information channels composed of image symbols within, completing the creative closed loop from “information editing” to “information reception.” Brecht believed that people like theater because they seek defamiliarization. To make the most habitual life strange, and from that strangeness, thought arises, followed by new observation and new judgment. Therefore, the shift in modifiers within Zhang Zhaoying's social theater, life theater, and individual theater also signals his return from understanding the era he inhabits to observing his own interiority. Throughout over a decade of creation, Zhang Zhaoying's painting has not provided conclusive statements. Instead, it revolves around procedural experimentation and methodological testing, responding to a new generation's inquiries about what constitutes individuality and how to express it.

Lifelong Beauty – The Temptation of Chirico 180×200cm + 90×200cm × 2 panels Oil on Canvas 2023-2024


In the early 2000s, “Post-80s” emerged as a group noun in online forums, seemingly with a somewhat critical attitude. Regardless, from the questioning of adolescence to the early maturity after more than a decade of experience, the Post-80s generation already on their path never truly cared about those external evaluations. A generation growing up in an atmosphere of freedom more naturally moved towards the life trend of flaunting individuality to constructing it. During his studies in Belgium, Zhang Zhaoying deliberately majored in stage art, a rational deepening of his interest-driven creations from his undergraduate years. While some artists opt for image subtraction, Zhang Zhaoying begins with addition to assemble image gatherings. This is a personalized choice belonging to the artist after deliberation, using the “falseness” of theater to mask the “truth” in life. He selects a multitude of complex elements for folding and splicing in his works because what Zhang Zhaoying aims to establish is a world stage directed by himself, a subjective truth that requires no verification in objective reality. From the perspective of image truth, perhaps no representational image can be absolutely real, just as countless images of God were created from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, but which one conforms to God's true portrait? To ascertain the truth of fabricated images, Zhang Zhaoying exhibits a certain simplicity in painting technique. Viewed as a whole, he employs the most familiar representational painting method, even though his subject matter is bizarre and dazzlingly diverse. If image individuality is a typical characteristic of this era, then Zhang Zhaoying's creation fits perfectly. Unlike expressing pure sentiment, his painting presents a rational image collage, neither lyrical nor pathetic, not conveying emotions through the speed of the brush or the tension of colors, but solely using the combination of images and adaptation of their original sources as the energy field for weaving and overlaying information.

A Little Theater a Day No.9 Oil on Canvas 30×20cm

Compared to the previous generation of artists who had concrete, physical experiences of “immersing in life,” most of the experiences acquired by today's young artists are indirect. Currently, our main channels for obtaining information no longer rely solely on the traditional person-to-person model; everything can be obtained indirectly. Although we are aware of falling into the systemic malfunction of information cocoons, the preferences of consciousness construct a new life fluid flowing from the indirect to a direct mixture in the brain. Zhang Zhaoying and his peers share similar disciplinary educational backgrounds. From middle school (or even earlier), they anchored themselves in fine arts. Elite specialized course learning and general knowledge accumulation could not be relaxed in the slightest. Entering professional study at higher art academies and daily quests mainly relied on teacher instruction and textual reading (including, of course, books and the internet). The previous generation of artists encountered the diffuse liberal context of the 90s after graduation, while Zhang Zhaoying and his cohort coincidentally met a stage of society where marketization rapidly soared after graduation. The immense abundance of material information passively swept this generation into the era's current without choice. They rapidly absorbed all kinds of information from all directions, processing and transforming it in their minds. This indirect experience lends their paintings a consistently cool sense of alienation. For instance, in the Lifelong Learning series, Zhang Zhaoying chose it as a creative motif, throughout which runs the piecing together and appropriation of a series of images from art history, cultural history, social public symbols, and popular advertisements. By altering the originally public semantic meanings of images and piecing them together into a new mode of visual understanding—containing elements of jest, ridicule, as well as absurdity and bewilderment—this habit of acquiring book knowledge perhaps stems precisely from the youth of this generation of only children, who were once subjected to passive “cramming education.”

After Work, Gleaning the Wheat Again Oil on Canvas 200×200cm, 2022

This is an era of shattered traditional rules and the establishment of new lifestyles. The shift from countryside to city, declining towns replaced by tourist cultural scenic spots, and cities becoming exchange fields for people's means of production and value. The older generation retains their inherent cultural habits, but the younger generation searches for those epochal fragments that can piece together the self within an increasingly complex social spectacle. Various image elements appearing in series like Life Soap Opera and Life Props form unfamiliar times and spaces within new scenic arrangements. Millet's The Gleaners continue to “work overtime” in the evening amidst ruins; portraits of renowned critics and artists on “Art Island” are enveloped in the aura of classical painting; political figures, celebrities, and philosophers stand with their backs to the CBD buildings of the “sleepless city”; anime and cartoons are also invited by Zhang Zhaoying to participate in the splendid banquets of wine and lights. Using “representational” painting techniques to fabricate reality is a visual trap Zhang Zhaoying lays within his creations. The atmospheres of these images are almost the spatial domains most familiar to the public, yet he uses the alienation of time and space to alert the viewer: a momentary voiding of primal aesthetic expectations. “Reproducing classical sculptures and architectural spaces as physical carriers of time, when facing the classic originals, one can feel a completely different visual experience. This is the dual transformation of visual experience concerning temporal painting in the image era: when images and symbols enter our visual system, this is the first ‘input’; while the visual shock brought by the temporal journey of the original classic rewrites the original ‘program,’ also changing our understanding of solidified time in art history, breaking the concept of ‘eternity’ in time,” Zhang Zhaoying once elaborated in his article The Time Magician—On Temporality in Artistic Creation, discussing his understanding and reflections on those temporal-spatial dislocations in his work. Painting is a theater woven by the artist. In this theater, the appropriation of any image or symbol points toward a new surrealist style, situated between the reality visible to the naked eye and the illusion of knowledge systems. But if quantum mechanics advances further, perhaps in multidimensional space-time, all so-called reality will be rewritten by another reality. The artist's creation merely wishes to propose a kind of re-editing of time and space, and this alienated visual sensation is precisely the era we inhabit today: the impact of informatization and digitalization increases the density and depth of globalization and cultural exchange; social inequality and class solidification generate cultural identity and identity conflicts; performance-based KPIs mechanize humans; psychological pressure and feelings of loneliness and fragmentation are tireless. Zhang Zhaoying uses images to create a personalized visual world, participating with a performative nature in observing current social life. The fragmented context hints that single-linear life logic has long since departed, while the profusion of information narrates a contradiction and conflict within a rapidly changing society.

Night Patrol CHINA – From MoMA to M+ Oil on Canvas 500×400cm, 2025

This Generation – Art Island C 142×200cm (Painting) + 71×100cm (Photography) Oil on Canvas, Archival Matte Paper Xiao Quan & Zhang Zhaoying 2024, Unique Edition

The civilizational conflicts unfolded in the last century seem to have found some superficial alleviation in the new century (though not excluding that various forms of “competition” are still being staged in local regions). On the one hand, those we once called the “Third World,” within a context of deep homogenization, have suddenly become points of contact for global GDP and cultural diversity. On the other hand, fast-food culture stimulates people who have no time for deep thought, rendering perfectionism and the “slow pace of the past” powerless to manage contemporary life. In an art era where dry conceptual art exhausts itself in lengthy explanations, perhaps painting, as an ancient art form, remains a genuine need of the human heart. Kenneth Clark ultimately admitted: God bestowed talent upon great artists, which is tantamount to shattering those modern societies cultivated by models. But indeed, limited art history selects only those seeds of individuality. Since 1978, the history of new Chinese art has been rehearsed in cycles within stylism, shaping the elite myth of the Chinese painting scene. The protracted East-West cultural debate that once troubled artists of the last century has long ceased to be a key issue of concern for today's young artists. What they face is a rich world effortlessly synchronized with the globe—market, discourse power, appearance rate, effectiveness, money, etc., constitute the epochal facts already familiar to this generation. And Zhang Zhaoying's painting provides us with precisely such an image spectacle: on one hand, thematic creation has dissipated in the world of the youth; they have incidentally also discarded so-called stylism. On the other hand, they are striving to create a world of customized individuality. In that ideal hall, there are no various regulations and restrictions. Qi Baishi and Leonardo da Vinci can be contemporaries; bars, banquet halls, stages, art history, letters, theater—everything can be gently accommodated in the utopia of imagination. Street vendors, ruffians and knights, Marilyn Monroe and religious figures—these rich symbols are announcing that an era of globalized writing for the theater of art history is about to arrive.

Oriental Tales—Blue Diamond 2024-2025 Oil on canvas 315×150cm

Originally published in *Art Contemporary*, Issue 4, 2025

Exhibition Information：

终身映画

Lifelong Picture

学术主持：吕澎

Academic Host: Lü Peng

艺术家：张钊瀛

Artisit: Zhang Zhaoying

展览总监：李国华

Exhibition Director: Li Guohua

策展人：甘挺

Curator: Gan Ting

展览统筹：梁宇

Exhibition Coordinator: Liang Yu

展期/Duration：2025.11.09- 2026.01.15

地址/Address

中国深圳市福田区福中路184号深圳市当代艺术与城市规划馆L2层2-7号

那特画廊

L-Art Gallery, Room No. 2-7, 2/F, Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning, 184 Fuzhong Rd, Futian District, Shenzhen, China

- Author Profile-

游艺

(You Yi)

Ph.D. in Fine Arts, Master's Supervisor, Curator, and Art History Researcher.

Formerly served as the Director of Academic Collections at the Guanghui Art Museum, primarily engaged in research related to contemporary Chinese ink art and contemporary art exhibitions. Has uted major biennale activities such as the Shenzhen International Ink Painting Biennale and the Chengdu Biennale; has curated multiple contemporary ink art forums and research-based exhibitions. Published works include *A History of Contemporary Chinese Ink Art, 1978–2020* and *Research on the Shenzhen International Ink Painting Biennale*.

Typesetting / Zhang Siping

Reprinted with permission from IVA Art

那特画廊隶属于那特艺术集团，立足深圳、上海、成都，专注于发掘、推广并长期代理极具潜力与专业价值的艺术家。作为根植于那特艺术集团多年学术积淀与专业体系的新兴艺术空间，那特画廊始终秉持严谨的学术性与专业性，以开阔的视野连接本土与国际艺术生态。我们致力于为艺术家构建具有思想深度的展示与交流平台，推动当代艺术的多元表达与跨界探索，在快速变迁的时代中，以艺术史的宏阔视角，记录并塑造属于未来的艺术语言，以实现推动21世纪艺术史发展的使命。

开放时间｜Opening Hours

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地址｜Address

中国深圳市福田区福中路184号

深圳市当代艺术与城市规划馆L2层，2-7

Room No. 2-7, 2/F, Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning, 184 Fuzhong Rd, Futian District, Shenzhen, China

深圳市当代艺术与城市规划馆

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