Bath Time

	.	Feel So Dirty (The Bath), original figurative oil painting portrait by Tang Hai Guo (2012) There is a proliferation of counterfeiting and padding, in production of most anything, in China, today.  From fake eggs to fake iPhones, as if that's not bad enough.  Worse still is how greed has driven people to put melamine in milk, sell recycled, dirty cooking oil, and put all sorts of dangerous chemicals, as substitutes in much of the food and medicine that's produced in China. It could make you feel unclean, like you need to take a bath after circulating among such filth. We like it for the story and for the figurative style of the portraiture that Tang has developed.  We like it even more because it isn't some skinny girl.  Like sculptor, Xu Hong Fei, whose work we also have in the gallery, Tang has chosen the classical voluptuous woman as his subject in the painting.  Yet, still, she is a modern woman, wearing makeup, with toiletries, body washes and lotions lining her bathroom wall.  Adding a bit of surrealism is that the background is the sky with a few grey clouds floating by.