There are four paintings in Zhang Xuerui’s The God of Small Things. The title is taken from the best selling novel by Arundhati Roy, which tells a story from the perspective of a child. The smallness that the child sees makes the adult (integrated and reasonable) world seem dubious. In her artistic expression, ‘small things’ refer to the imperceptible: the relational and sensitive. And while the motifs of her paintings are clear – colors and grids – it is the color that
provides the key to the manifestation of space. On a metaphorical level, her pursuit of color serves to reveal ‘space’ vividly on canvas. The grids present the path which is filled with color gradations, the subtlest possible shift in colors from one square to the next. The effect of these ephemeral individual units suggests the sense of overall diffusion. Each of them contains a horizon at different positions on canvas; above and below this horizon is mirrored, like the meeting of the sky and the sea.
