MLitt Fine Art Practice School of Fine Art
Xiaoyi Zhao
I live in an artistic family, both of my parents work with art and painting and their creative world became my earliest childhood initiation, as I grew up and studied I found myself unspeakably attracted to the depiction of dreams, which led to a fascination with the creation of surrealist themes. These themes are not only the core of my artistic expression, but also my way of dialogue with the world from the depths of my heart.
My pursuit of art is not limited to the boundaries of the canvas. I aspire to find inspiration in multicultural cities, to feel the mingling and collision between different civilisations. This exploration allows me to break through to understand and express the subtle connection between man and nature. This is what brought me to Glasgow, a city whose diversity and inclusiveness give me unlimited creative possibilities. Here, I use surrealist brushstrokes to capture the intersection of dream and reality, and endeavour to show my deep pursuit of art and unique inner world in my works.
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Works
Dreams
In this series of my works, inspired by the Chinese painting technique of pictograms, I set the tone on a tree, and these small works of varying sizes are attached to the branches of the tree to form a whole. What can be seen is a part of the whole, and the whole needs to be imagined by the viewer, which is exactly what the Chinese painting technique of “outside the image” is all about. While Western landscapes impress the viewer with nature itself, Chinese paintings impress the viewer with the symbolism behind nature.
Within this whole, there are branches, birds, and the sky, each of which is placed where it belongs, providing the viewer with details and hints to help him or her visualise the whole picture and the parts that are not painted. Imagine the whole picture based on the bits and pieces that are already there, and let your imagination fill the whole wall.
And this way of piecing together the whole with fragmentary details echoes the theme of my series. The theme of this series of works is dreams, and things in dreams are, as I said, fragmented. When we wake up, we usually don’t remember the dream as a whole, and instead we are left with a lot of small incoherent details that are either clear or vague. If we try to recall the origin and history of the whole dream, we can only piece together the whole by recalling one small detail after another. Just like the form of my works in this series, they are scattered on the wall in a haphazard and disorganised manner. But when we dig carefully, we will find the connection.
