WORK / LIVE 干活 Zhao Tao 赵涛, Zhang Xiuliang 张秀良, Zhang Mengmeng 张萌萌

Innocent line drawings run across electric-blue walls while billowing foam is caught at its peak. Badlands is the world of Zhao Tao, Zhang Xiuliang and Zhang Mengmeng, created with the Social Sensibility Institute for the Work, Live series at Arrow Factory. Here, the tools of an industrial assembly line are used for expressive rather than practical ends.

Zhao Tao unleashes industrial foam and paint: the swelling forms reinterpret the mountains of his home village and, for him, the thrill of a long winter hunt. On the walls, Zhang Xiuliang’s fishing images, drawn with the help of his daughter Zhang Mengmeng, depict softly rippling streams in a place where time is suspended, beyond the demands of daily life – a meditative act of resistance. The vivid indigo of the walls comes from the finished products leaving the factory line.

Hunting and fishing were the “work” of agrarian societies; today they belong to childhood landscapes, memory and leisure. Playfully subverting the apparatus of dehumanised industrial labour, Zhao and Zhang turn the by-products of the modern factory into their own idyllic experience of nature, in a space where work and pleasure intertwine.

Zhao Tao (born 1987, Zhangjiakou) had worked at Bernard Controls for seven years, painting valve actuators and training new employees. The title comes from his sardonic description of his home village, where he intends to return and run for village chief, hoping to save it before it becomes desolate. Zhang Xiuliang (born 1985, Qiqihar) assembles valve actuators on the line; his daughter Zhang Mengmeng was nine years old.

Text adapted from the Arrow Factory introduction.