Xiao Fan's 'Cent Fleurs' at Villa Tamaris

At Villa Tamaris in La Seyne-Sur-Mer, France, from May 5 to June 10, 2001, Chinese painter Xiao Fan (born Nanjing, 1954; based in Paris since 1983) presented his series 'Cent Fleurs' (One Hundred Flowers). The series references Mao Zedong's 1957 slogan 'Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.' Xiao Fan painted one hundred flowers, each on a 60 x 60 cm square canvas with a neutral monochrome background (white, beige, pink), arranged like a mosaic or mural. These are deliberately artificial, hybrid flowers drawn from architecture (towers, labyrinths), pastry (layer cakes, dripping cream), clothing (skirts, ruffles), mechanics (wheels, gears), and the human body (lips, penises, vulvas, breasts). The flowers are surreal, humorous, and erotic, blending yin and yang, fullness and emptiness, dryness and wetness, turgescence and detumescence, roughness and transparency. Pascale Le Thorel-Daviot wrote the catalogue preface, noting that one of China's oldest names is Hua (flower), and it is still called Zhong Hua (the land of flowers). The exhibition was organized by Villa Tamaris.