It’s hard to describe Zhang Zipiao’s art as beautiful, at least in the conventional sense. There’s an anatomical precision to the way her subjects are often sliced and examined against backdrops of unexpected colors. With close scrutiny, her purple bananas begin to resemble fingers, and pumpkin seeds seem to turn into blood vessels floating in a pool of crimson. The paintings mesmerize and challenge the viewer: “What is beauty?” the artist asks. “Does it always have to be so clean and perfect?”
张子飘的艺术很难被称为“美”，至少在传统意义上如是。她的创作对象通常会被切成片，且在意想不到的颜色背景下进行精确“解剖”。细细端详，画里的紫色香蕉慢慢变成了手指，而南瓜籽似乎变成了血管，漂浮在深红色的一汪水潭里。这些画作令观者着迷，并向他们发出视觉上的挑战：“什么是美？”艺术家问道，“难道它必须得一直那么干净和完美吗？”
Zhang is among four Chinese artists recognized by 2019’s Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia. Like many of her millennial peers, she expresses an individualism born out of a booming economy at home and a global perspective gained from studying abroad. Artists of her generation are at the forefront of China’s flourishing art scene, and a newfound freedom has enabled them to pursue topics of personal fascination. For Zhang, these have been beauty in the social media age and, more recently, power dynamics in relationships.
在 2019 年福布斯榜上 30 位亚洲 30 岁以下艺术家中，张子飘是其中之一。像许多千禧一代的同龄人一样，她的作品表达了一种个人主义，这种个人主义得益于从国内经济的蓬勃发展和海外留学的经历中获得的全球视野。她这一代的艺术家站在中国崛起的艺术舞台的最前沿，一种新的自由使他们能够追求自己感兴趣的话题。而对于张子飘来说，她想探索的就是“美”如何在社交媒体时代定义与人际关系间的权力动态。
A natural instinct for colors and composition led Zhang to challenge notions of conventional beauty at a young age. Her classmates and teachers used to mock her paintings because students were expected to conform to a realistic style in order to be accepted into Chinese art colleges. Though Zhang’s free-spiritedness played a role in pushing against these standards, she also credits her father, who taught animation at Tsinghua University, as a key figure in her artistic growth. “He told me to ignore them and paint whatever I wanted, and this encouraged me a lot to paint freely and not be framed by the rigid system,” she recalls. Zhang eventually left the system altogether to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
对色彩和构图的自然本能，使张子飘在年轻时就开始挑战传统美的观念。因为通常想要被中国艺术学院录取的学生都是创作现实风格的作品，张子飘的同学和老师过去常常嘲笑她的画。但张子飘随心所欲的性格，却让她抛开这些过时的理念。而在清华大学教动画的父亲，也是她艺术成长的关键人物，“他告诉我要无视那些说法，想画什么就画什么。这鼓励了我自由绘画，而不是被僵化的体系所束缚。”她回忆道。最终，张子飘离开了国内的艺术体系，到芝加哥艺术学院学习。
In Chicago, social media was becoming a ubiquitous part of everyday life. Zhang was intrigued by the way people and objects were presented on these platforms, in a manner that she believed was too simple. “The beauty most people think about can be too one-sided,” she says. “The fruits I paint are often cut; this conveys a sense of revealing the truth underneath whatever the skin is—whether it be of a human or something else.” Her painting process is one of discovery; she continuously shapes her pieces in search of a form that surprises or satisfies her.
Zhang’s fascination with objects can be traced back to her upbringing. “Your childhood can have a lifetime of an impact,” she says. She explains that her fixation on material objects is rooted in a “lack of belonging” she experienced as a child, when she lived apart from her father and moved from rental to rental with her mother. Throughout this instability, she found solace in familiar objects. “I liked anything that had my mom’s smell first, like her clothes or her side of the bed,” she says. “I liked to linger in the smell and chew on it, sleep with it, or hold it—every method you could imagine.”
在芝加哥，社交媒体正成为日常生活中无处不在的一部分。张子飘对人们和物品在这些平台上被展示的方式很感兴趣，她认为这种方式太过简单。“大多数人认为美过于片面。”她说，“我画的水果经常是被切割的，这传达了一种在肌理之下揭示真相的感觉——不管它是人类还是其他什么东西。”她的绘画过程是一个发现的过程，张子飘不断地塑造她的作品，以寻找一种惊喜或满足她的形式。
张子飘对物品的迷恋可以追溯到她的成经历。“你的童年可以影响一生。”她说，她对物质物品的执着根植于她小时候经历的一种“缺乏归属感”，当时她与父亲分居，跟着母亲四处搬家。在这种不稳定的情况下，她从那些熟悉的物品中找到了慰借。“我喜欢任何先闻到我妈味道的东西，比如她的衣服或者床的一侧。我喜欢流连和沉浸在气味中，和它一起睡觉，或者拥抱它。”张子飘补充道，“极尽一切你能想到的方法。”
Zhang’s recent work on relationships builds off of her previous exploration of beauty and the connections we can have with objects. Just as she sees beauty as encompassing more than our conventional ideas, she hopes to challenge our understanding of relationships. “There is no absolute equality in any relationship,” she says. She sees relationships as constantly evolving balances of power, and sex as one form of expressing this dynamic. “Sex is never just about sex itself,” she says. Just as beauty can be found in imperfections and underlying meanings, the subtle expressions of power and vulnerability in sex are rife for examining what a harmonious relationship can or should look like.
张子飘最近的作品，是建立在她之前对美的探索和我们与物品之间的联系上，对人际关系方面的研究。正如她认为美不仅仅是传统观念，她也希望挑战我们对人际关系的理解。“在任何关系中都不存在绝对的平等，”她说。她认为这是不断演变的力量平衡，性爱是表达这种动态的一种形式。“性爱从来不只是性爱本身。”正如美丽可以在不完美和潜在的意义中找到新的定义一样，一段和谐的情感关系，也可以透过性爱中的力量和脆弱的微妙感来得以了解。
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Contributor: Eugene Lee
Images Courtesy of White Space Beijing
Chinese Translation: Chen Yuan
