Zhang Xiao Tao

Rotting strawberries, overflowing garbage trucks, melting birthday cakes, used condoms and armies of ants are all subjects of Zhang Xiao Tao's large-scale oil paintings, highlighting the artist's central preoccupations: decay, disgust and death. No artist has rendered the spectacle of consumption and excess in as much vivid detail, and this large and comprehensive monograph captures the provocative nature of Zhang Xiao Tao's painting in arresting detail, whether horrifying or edifying: What happens to the waste we create, both in our minds and in our space? What are the inanimate consequences of overindulgence? And what is the cost of denial? By highlighting the natural processes that come from unchecked desire, Zhang Xiao Tao creates a portrait of reality as intimate as it is subaltern, macrocosmic views of microcosmic spaces, both physical and psychic, that have been reclaimed by nature.