A Hometown

Since 2011, Zhang has shifted all his work to the hometown he knows best, a place closely associated with his growth and memory. At the beginning, he created a series of works through polaroid emulsion lift, as a metaphor for the process of tearing and repairing himself and his hometown, and through these collage images, to find a balance between memory and reality.

And the Zhang Xiao at that time, to the hometown, is more like a wandering kid in the village, aimlessly looking for the hometown ruins in the reflective coins. He dumped all the old stuff out of the old drawers of his house, rummaged through his relatives old photo albums, roamed the photo studios hidden in the market, and even borrowed the village councils rural cooperative medical certificate for everyone in the village in order to get a portrait of all villagers.

In his work on hometown, Zhang Xiao quotes Fei Xiaotong in His work Rural China: Every specific living group has its special language, and there are many words and phrases that cannot be translated in other languages. These images of hometown are just some language that projects the complex relations in the local society into the flat consumption ideology and aesthetic logic.

Duringtheresearch of hishometown, Zhang Xiao gradually built up, or rediscovered the rural aesthetics surrounding him at his early ages, that various kinds of visual perception, schema, text, color whichis in compatible to theurban, fashionable, modern, however, to some extent, sources from peoples imagination to the city, the authority and yearning of a better life .

In his scattered exploration of his hometown, the symbol Apple is of more significance to Zhang Xiao than other works. If all of Zhang Xiaos works about his hometown are spread out on a map, we will find that Zhang Xiaos works about apples, as if in the center of such a village, build an orchard. He said: From the macro perspective of Them and Coastline, to the return to my hometown, and then to Apple, my creation has a process from surface to line, from line to point. After that, I hope to eliminate the geographical dot in my hometown and replace it with something more symbolic an apple.