Zhang Xiaogang

Kwangju Biennale 2000: Man+Space, March - June 2000
Utsunomiya Museum of Art, Invisible Boundary: Metamorphosed Asian Art, September - October 2000
Almelo, Museum Kunsthal Hof 88, Chengdu Movement, January - February 2001
Jakarta, National Gallery of Indonesia, From China with Art, March 2003
Hong Kong Arts Center, Umbilical Cord of History, March 2004

There is a quietly seductive, albeit disturbing, appeal to Zhang Xiaogang’s paintings. They hover between realistic depiction and dreamy illusion. Zhang has achieved this by bringing together a number of dilemmas: he uses a technique based on western academic realism to suggest unreality and illusion; he portrays a private insular world by means of a public artistic language, hinting at unspoken public trauma through individuals’ secrets. Over twenty years, Zhang has managed to resolve the passage of his own style from an early expressionist period to arrive at a form of classicism. In both its technical and thematic concerns, Zhang’s art has become a canon of contemporary Chinese oil painting, and its merits depend very much on the new solutions Zhang developed to harness Western classical academic technique (a standard training in Chinese academies of art), thereby turning it into an indigenous artistic language.

Zhang is very much a product of the Chinese art academy system, and out of this heritage he has developed an iconography and identified a special sensibility that in many ways defines this era. As Zhang’s footing is within the academy system, the system may rightfully claim credit for his success; so it follows that Zhang should also be looked upon as the paradigmatic success story of the official Chinese art world. Bloodline and Amnesia and Memory, the two series that made Zhang’s reputation in the 1990s, focus on portraiture, a subject underscored by concerns with visual portrayal of the Chinese figure, especially concerning issues in adapting Western classical painting to local needs. In the 1980s Western classical technique was again reinstated as the norm for Chinese art academies, especially at the Central Art Academy; but the technique was never totally naturalized as a form of Chinese art. Apart from the fact that academic art was held back by conservatism, so that it fell behind the vanguard in experimentation, it had in fact failed to create a fully satisfactory “Chinese” solution to technical and stylistic expression. Zhang’s answer to this problem is to revive the charcoal portraiture technique developed in the Republican era (1912-1949), which excelled in capturing subtle facial expressions through treating the surfaces to approach an effect of flatness. The portraits thereby attain a serenity and stylistic beauty that border on individual character and generic features. Through this technical solution Zhang has also made historical cultural contact with the pioneering era of the 1910s, a period when Western painting techniques were first successfully borrowed by popular art to portray the human figure, and subsequently adapted to mass culture in popular folk taste. The result is therefore a style of portraiture close to the traditional Chinese sensibility, and one that may rightfully claim to constitute a new paradigm.

It is interesting to point out that for most of these two series of paintings Zhang has basically avoided portraying the complete body; the few isolated examples showing the full figure were claimed by the artist to be “experiments,” (in conversation with the author), implying that these are premature examples. Zhang has therefore sidestepped the problems concerning the portrayal of a full “Chinese body.” Traditionally, the shape of the body in Chinese art was mainly implied by the volume and flow of the garment. Most figure drawings depicting the body show it as stationary. When the body is in action, as depicted in prints of opera scenes, it also resembles a stationary pose, suggesting timelessness rather than ephemerality. It follows that in visual art the “pre-modern” Chinese body essentially belonged to a situation and a scene, seldom described independently of either the garment or the action. This “situated” Chinese body differs from its European counterpart in that the latter is the sum total of two parts: an independent nude body and its clothing. Although Zhang has largely avoided the body, by calling upon the custom of traditional figurative art his stylized facial features and the stiff frontal pose already suffice to imply that which remains unpainted. In broad terms, one may claim that Zhang has fulfilled the official art academy’s ambition of creating a national classical figure by going into the Chinese past, drawing upon traditional portraiture, and fitting it to the current context.

Thematically, the subject of the family is also classically Chinese. Through the tradition of portraiture, Zhang has returned to the iconography of ancestor portraiture of which every Chinese would have vague collective memory. In the age of photography, it became natural for the memory of “ancestor portraits” to be revived within the grounds of the photography studio.

In Zhang’s hands, the skills of realism have been employed to depict a situation that seems neither real nor imaginary, drawing the audience into the hyper-reality of art. In a realm straddling reality and fantasy, the viewer is invited to linger upon ambiguities bordering the public and the private, hinting at memory and forgetfulness, personal and public traumas. To have achieved this artistic effect is perhaps the real reason for Zhang’s popular success in the recent decade. Not only has he reinvented a classical icon, he has used it to articulate unutterable public taboos as well as personal, private secrets.

Zhang’s artistic success rests in his exploration of a sensitive area wedged between dichotomies, articulating secrets that long to be told but remain suppressed. Bloodline and Amnesia and Memory reflect the historical problem of the clash between family and nationhood, exposing conflicting loyalties and public wounds still seeking reparation. It is through the confines of the photography studio that the artist has exposed this dimension of history. In a portrait studio the protagonists are held captive, fossilized as still faces. Each one tries to show his best side to the world as this is the memory he is leaving to posterity. Each is making an effort for memory of the future. This fixed moment is therefore suspended between past and future, when each person is joined to the other for eternity. Here we find a common understanding between them that cannot be readily articulated; it is like sharing a secret, a common wound. We are not told the contents of this wound, but the artist seems to imply that we should know anyway because we have arrived from that same history; and he has hinted at that history through the costumes and make-up. Perhaps this is the significance of Zhang’s art for this era: he has portrayed a public history through the subtleties of a classical iconography, and has captured the complex emotions hidden by history’s public face. As such the Bloodline imagery is recognized as a defining icon of our time.

(Adapted from Chang Tsong-zung's catalogue essay "Between Reality and Illusion," Umbilical Cord of History: Paintings by Zhang Xiaogang, Hanart TZ Gallery and Galerie Enrico Navarra, 2004.)