ZHONG CHENG

Provenance：

Illustrated：

Exhibition：

Exposition：

In 1987, Cao Xiaodong finished “It Is Done” series, the most representative painting experiment during the 85 new trends. (“It is done” is quoted from the Genesis.) The images of archeology, nature, religion and art history are arranged in an order similar to the structure of He Tu Luo Book, forming an intriguing quality and triggering the viewer’s imagination of the East and West, the real and the surreal, the secular and religious, the past and the present. The use of sobering geometric elements was rare in painting of that era. Just as Zhu Qi said “Cao Xiaodong tried to use the features of the scientific image of cartography to go beyond the symbolism of the painting image in the religions, history and cultures and return to the creation of a personal meaning of the image itself.” The thick gloomy tone of the picture demonstrated a clear association with the Renaissance painting, therefore, combining the Oriental mysticism artistic conceptions and the images of Western classical style texture in a surrealistic space.