前言

ESLITE GALLLERY Beijing is delighted to present artist Zhang An’s solo exhibition from April 11 to July 27, 2025. This exhibition will feature Zhang An’s latest paintings in recent years, where he has been exploring the subtle relationship between time, reality, and individual emotions through delicate brushstrokes and exquisite composition.

Having completed bachelor’s, master’s, and then doctoral studies at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, he received rigorous training in academic art., his creations depict social phenomena through realist techniques, where urban transformations and personal experience are intertwined. They come in a form similar to visual diaries, turning everyday scenes in life into artistic language with deep narratives. From the urban housing demolition sites in Shangqiu, Henan province, to a common campus scene in Beijing, and to the loneliness of living in the city of Tianjin, his works both record and reflect on the social landscape as society changes and develops.

In his Monument series, scenes of demolition sites, overpass construction, and ruins with bare steel are imbued with unique symbolic weight; not only do they document urban expansion, but they have also become visual metaphors for the passage of time. For example, in Monument 1 (2015-2018), the order and tension of modernization are conveyed with dense scaffolding and the overpass under construction above a railroad. The end result is something restrained yet tense.

The years 2019 to 2023, when he was a doctoral candidate, witnessed a transition in his artistic creation from grand urban-related narratives to the details of daily life. He went back to painting small, everyday scenes, which grew to seemingly insipid records of society. His paintings in that stage are calm and restrained, resembling snapshots that carry wordless records and memories. During these years, he took a calm yet determined approach to artistic exploration. The themes and ways of presentation were expanded, which added more layers and depths to his painting, allowing for more appealing narratives.

After his work, he is more focused on individual existence in the modern city. Delivery Worker (2024) captures a fleeting moment when a delivery worker takes a brief rest between tasks. Despite lying relaxed on his e-bike, he has to maintain his balance with his posture, while vehicles and people rush by in the background, revealing the loneliness and exhaustion of urban laborers. In Mother and Child (2024), tenderness and solitude are expressed in an everyday setting. In the sitting area of a shopping mall, the mother, half-sitting and half-lying, looks slightly tired. On her lap sits her child, whose head is surrounded by a sacred halo, adding a sense of tranquility to this ordinary moment. Tricycle (2025) employs unique composition and color to explore the intersecting of modern social mobility and individual existence, revealing the alienness of contemporary urban life through the figures’ postures and spatial arrangement.

Campus in the Snow (2024), however, gives a different feeling. With delicate brushstrokes, the artist captures a corner of the campus in the snow—a seemingly ordinary scene at first glance, yet deep in the snow-laden branches, lie profound cultural codes. Echoes of Pieter Bruegel and Mark Rothko’s color blocks, stone carvings of the Han dynasty, pottery figurines, and ancient jade patterns, are all ingeniously woven into the heavy snow, waiting for the attentive viewer to discover. Layer upon layer of time quietly settles on the canvas, turning this serene snowscape into a poetic reflection on history, memory, and visual art.

In addition to showcasing the memory and transformation of the city, Zhang An’s works embed temporal depth in his realistic brushstrokes. The relationship between people and space in his paintings is subtle and thought-provoking, where each scene contains traces of the overlap between history and the present. Through nuanced shifts in light and shadow, as well as composition, his works flow in stillness, infusing reality with poetry.

This solo exhibition of Zhang An is not only a retrospective of his creative journey, but also a profound dialogue about time, memory, and humanistic care. Eslite Gallery sincerely invites art enthusiasts from all walks of life on an exploration of Zhang An’s tales of time.