Hometown's Savory Cured Delights

Title:​ Hometown's Savory Cured Delights — Le Venezie International Watercolor Festival Overall Third Prize ($500)

Artist:​ Zhang Xiaoqin (China)

Dimensions:​ 34 × 49 cm

Year:​ 2025

Medium:​ Watercolour

About the Artist

Zhang Xiaoqin is a Chinese watercolor artist whose work turns with warmth and precision toward the textures of everyday life — the familiar, the domestic, the deeply local. Hometown's Savory Cured Delights is a painting rooted in memory and place: the cured meats, preserved foods, and salted provisions that fill the kitchens and market stalls of a Chinese hometown carry with them the full weight of seasonal ritual, family tradition, and the particular flavor of belonging. In choosing such an unassuming subject, Zhang elevates the ordinary into the poetic — a gesture entirely in keeping with the best traditions of still life painting, from the Dutch masters to the present day. Through watercolour's translucent washes and capacity for textural nuance, she renders the glistening surfaces, deep earthen tones, and tactile richness of her subject with a fidelity that is as much emotional as it is visual.