Zhang Xiaotao's "A Joyful Time," where huge oil and watercolor paintings invite viewers into a bright underwater world of copulating frogs and intertwined human forms, the reaction "elated and free" comes back to mind. Amphibious creatures float unencumbered in washes of blue, green, and orange paint, their outlines making whimsical, eye-pleasing shapes. So it is with great surprise that one learns of the artist's background?that he nearly drowned as a child and is afraid of water, and that he comes from a country whose reproductive policies are heavy-handed and punitive. Zhang's first exhibit in the United States, accompanying a month-long residency at the Pacific Bridge Gallery, which last spring garnered attention for its controversial exhibition of Ho Chi Minh portraits. Zhang, who is 29, has a degree in oil painting and teaches it at Southwest Jiaotong University in Chengdu.

Some of the largest works, at the back of the gallery, are also the most provocative. In dark gray-green hazes float huge, rubbery shapes. They are transparent sheaths with reservoir tips, and faces peer from behind, or inside. Tiny bubbles are suspended within the wrinkled tubes, and here and there a splattered dollop of red paint contrasts with the green. The faces glisten as if behind a windowpane, and their wide-eyed constraint elicits sadness.

Everywhere in Zhang's work one finds splotches of the red paint. It appears to be mixed with something that won't quite blend with it, and the effect is that of a potato stamp made from a bumpy, many-eyed spud. In the context of sex and birth, though, these bubbles and deep-red blotches are semen and blood. They are the repeating threads of humanity: liquids that transmit life, inheritance, and the most essential fluids of ancestry?containing not only DNA, but also the ways in which we (both animals and humans) need each other and hurt each other. In their aqueous environment, the drops, smears, and splotches also remind one of amoebas seen under a microscope, like beads of a primordial sea.

If every one of Zhang's paintings, as he claims, is a glimpse into his dreams about drowning, then it would seem his nightmares have faded over time and produced aesthetic remnants. Yet new demons, universal ones, have popped out of his work while he processed his fears. The underwater trauma that transformed itself into beauty via paint and repetition reinvents itself here with new sociological and psychological overtones. Something new is displacing his original memories, overlaying passion upon experience, and revealing the intersection of childhood and adulthood.

PROFILE

1970

?Born in Hechuan, Chongqing, China

EDUCATION

?Graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Fine Arts Institute

?Now teaching in the Southwest Jiao Tong University

?Lives and works in Beijing and Chengdu

His Selected Exhibitions

1.Three Languages Three Colors, UM Gallery, Korea

2.Jiang Hu, Jack Tilton Gallery, New York, U.S.A.

3.Poetic Realism: A reinterpretation of Jiangnan, RCM Art Museum, Nanjing, China

4.Unclear and Cleanness, Heyri Art Foundation, Korea

5.Chanting our happy life - the second China Song Zhuang Culture art Festival,

Beijing, China

6.Beautiful Imbroglio, He Xiang Ning Art Museum, Shenzhen, China (solo)

7.Dreamscapes, Foundation3, 14 Bergen, Norway (solo)

8.Dream Factory - Rubbish heap, Tokyo Gallery, Japan (solo)

9.Live in Chengdu, the Modern Art Museum, Chengdu, China

10.2nd Prague Biennial, Prague, National Gallery Veletrzni Palac, Prague, Czech Republic

11.nd Triennial of Chinese Arts, Nanjing Art Museum, Nanjing, China

12.The Road map of Painting, 798 Space, Beijing, China

13.Beyond Temporality - Pingyao Photography Festival, Shan xi, China

14.Conceptual Art ? Exhibition of Contemporary Paintings from China, Tap Seac Gallery, Macao, China

15.2nd Chengdu Biennial, the Modern Art Museum, Chengdu, China

16.Officinal Asia, Galleria d'Arte Modema, Bologna, Italy

17.Hua jia di, China Art seasons, Beijing, China