Secret garden

Xiaodong Zhang's Chinese blossoms

by Leon Nigrosh

XIAODONG ZHANG: PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE
At the Fletcher/Priest Gallery, 5 Pratt Street, Worcester, through March 31.

In the four years since Xiaodong Zhang left the People's Republic of China to come to Worcester, his paintings have created such interest he's been given his second solo exhibition at the Fletcher/Priest Gallery. Although there are only a dozen of his Chinese color pigment paintings on display, the gallery is filled with Asian sensibilities, exuding the calm, measured, and dispassionate representations of his chosen subjects. Yet there is an air of American culture surreptitiously blooming from within his compositions. They now have a greater maturity than his earlier works, contain a more certain artistic edge, show an increased use of high-key color, and convey a personal, philosophical attitude.

Flowers play an important role in many of Zhang's paintings. His Flowers in the Mist is a congested, horizontal array of pastel-toned white flowers haloed by splashes of bright color. It's a frenzied disorder, but with an illusive overall calm. Here, he takes advantage of the naturally occurring wrinkles and folds in the dense Chinese rice paper to suggest the idea of depth and dimensionality -- most unlike the flatness of traditional Chinese painting.

In his large Evening Garden, the pensive young girl is almost swallowed up by the profusion of peonies and a host of imaginary flowers. The golden-yellow floral color scheme and pattern extends even to her qipao, the traditional Manchu long dress, creating a silken, woodland camouflage. The same young woman appears in Summer Garden, only this time her qipao is red, contrasting the bounty of pale blossoms that surround her. Her expression suggests a dreamlike quality, as if she doesn't even notice the cat on her lap (which this viewer did not notice at first either).

As a young man, Zhang served in the Chinese army, affording him several opportunities to be stationed on extended stays in Tibet. There, he became engrossed in the landscape, the people, and the lifestyle. Many of his paintings are reflections of these memorable times. In Meditation Walk three red-robed, Tibetan Buddhist monks move among an almost abstract stand of multitoned trees. The composition's sense of depth is enhanced by the Tibetan fresco technique of layering paint on top of paint and partially rubbing areas away between coatings. Zhang employs this method, but with a Western touch -- he injects small segments of high-key gouache and acrylics into the mix to produce a brighter, more active surface than he could with just the Chinese pigments.

A more moody and introspective painting, Silent Prayer, has a solitary monk -- his back to the viewer -- gazing from a balcony onto a lush landscape. But something is askew. The holy man is obviously Tibetan, but the columns that frame the composition are distinctly European. Perhaps we are not looking at an image of a monk, but are witnessing the artist himself in an unguarded moment of reverie.

Zhang's most recent works have taken a step in a new direction. Having mastered the fresco-painting technique and smoothly amalgamated his dry pigments with gouache and acrylic, he has shifted from the representational toward the abstract -- but with an underlying message as well.

His Memories of Conflict series (a total of three paintings) has taken on the appearance of ancient tomb paintings, in which records of great battles are preserved. But instead of presenting us with graphic representations of bloody carnage so common in 17th-century Chinese and Japanese scroll paintings, Zhang chooses only to suggest the activities. Is that a horse's rump in the midst of the fray, or is it a soldier's shield?

These new pieces give the appearance of archaeological discoveries so recently unearthed that the soil has yet to be wiped away. In Memories of Conflict III what first appears to be a headless warrior soon turns into not one, but three shadowy figures, each engaged in the crowded scene. The painting's cloudy and fragmented appearance reveals only the barest of hints, suggesting the fruitlessness of eternal human strife, but leaves it up to the viewer to define the images as well as create the story.

For Zhang, his newfound visual vocabulary gives him a stronger sense of communication, through which he is able to stir his' own memories and create new ones for us.

The gallery is open Wednesday and Thursday from noon to 6 p.m. or by appointment. Call 791-5929.