Zhang Xiaogang

Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Now almost fifty, Zhang Xiaogang (b. 1958) has produced a body of work that increasingly seems of critical importance to his generation of Mainland Chinese artists.  A resolutely figurative painter, Zhang has, in his Bloodlines and other series, not only represented Chinese people to the outside world, but also to China itself, in ways that recontextualize Chinese features as essentially anonymous.  This anonymity refers to an earlier, but hardly forgotten time in Chinese history, when both men and women wore the obligatory Mao suit and cap, which deemphasized sexual difference in favor of class and gender equality.  Zhang’s idiosyncratic even eerie portraits, in which the faces of men and women are virtually the same, speak volumes about the kinds of social pressure within Maoist society at the time.

For Zhang, art encompasses the pursuit of psychological reality—there is no overt attempt to protest specific conditions, only an unspoken nostalgia that is ambivalent in its affiliations with the society of a past era. The method and gravity with which Zhang’s images are painted reflects his preoccupation with the core of Chinese identity; his portraits are based on old family photographs and charcoal drawings he buys on the street in China.  In Zhang’s primarily cool-toned paintings, whose color is usually limited to a small patch on the cheek, the thin red blood line, or occasionally a flash of color prescribed by dress code, we see Chinese people from a less affluent period of the past.  It is ironic, then, that these works now command the prices they do in the burgeoning market for Chinese art; the capitalist prosperity that acts as the engine driving Chinese culture today (both at home and abroad) tells us that Chinese mores are changing permanently.  But as such, Zhang’s art fills in an historical gap whereby the self-abnegation of the mass population becomes a strength in his work.

Although the artist claims that his truths are personal, his art reaches beyond the psychological to present a way of life – one that he lived, too – which was then highly politicized.  By focusing on one person at a time in his work, Zhang successfully describes the effect of Chinese politics on the common people.  Despite the anonymity and visual repetition of the artist’s portraits, there is always something – a color patch on the figure’s face, the thin bloodline – that moves the painting away from selflessness towards an assertion of identity.  Individuality is present, no matter how narrow or rigid the society may be.

It is important, therefore, to recognize the dignity with which the artist invests the spirit of the anonymous individuals he portrays. Somehow, it seems, these portraits are meant to survive as trace images of identities that refused complete capitulation to self-sacrifice.  Yet we are not sure whether Zhang’s portraits exalt anonymity or independence of being.  It is a question the works beg, which Zhang deliberately refrains from analyzing or answering.

Although it is possible to overemphasize the social implications of Zhang’s portraits, it is nonetheless clear that he represents a broad swathe of society through the silent presence of those he paints.  Their focused but mute regard and their obdurately obscure message have everything to do with the way the Chinese see themselves – not only during the Maoist period, but also today, when Chinese society is deeply interwoven with capitalist practices.  As such, it is little surprise that the precise content of Zhang’s enigmas is never fully explained, and the viewer’s experience remains essentially one of enchanted mystery.   

The attractiveness of his art today stems not only from his outstanding technical control, but also from the ambiguity of his meaning.  The viewer’s encounter with Zhang’s subtly painted portraits requires an openness of view that is likely the most significant attribute of the artist’s aesthetic.  Even as his aesthetic develops over the course of his career, this open aspect of his work remains consistent.  Sotheby’s is pleased to offer a range of work by Zhang Xiaogang that surveys his fascinating career, from the mid 1990s to recent years. 

Bloodline Series:  Three Comrades (Lot 21, 1994) is the earliest of Zhang’s paintings in the sale, a large canvas made while Zhang was seeking the most pared down formula for the bloodlines paintings.  Within this series of works, Three Comrades stands out in it’s dynamic color language, rhythmic repetition of color forms, and figural individuation.  While the anonymous figures are similar to one another in appearance, their features are sufficiently differentiated that they retain their identities.  Vestmental accoutrements such as the military pins each character wears would, in Zhang’s later work, often be dispensed with, and the complicated interlinking bloodline, rhyming with the other reds in the picture here, later comes to seem less of a strategic link among the sitter(s) than an abstract sign and signature stylistic element.  In this early work, however, the bloodlines don’t creep off the canvas to touch the world beyond.  Instead, this is a self-sufficient group of Zhang’s blood relatives, so to speak, and a beautifully balanced and harmonious picture – a magnificent example of Zhang Xiaogang’s work in this groundbreaking period. 

Two paintings of infants, Bloodline Series: Yellow Baby (1997, Lot 16) and Bloodline Series:  Pink Baby (1998, Lot 17), offer a contrast of identities born of age and sex.  The yellow baby, presumably female, although the hair and clothing suggest a male toddler, sits in what seems a dining room end chair.  The younger pink baby, in this case clearly male, is relegated to his more protective high-chair.  Yet both are set against a cool-toned backdrop with cottony white highlights and seem totally isolated in their worlds, the inviting, cottony softness of the background contrasting with the isolation such images evoke.

In 2000, Zhang made the delightful Bloodline Series: Comrade Boy (Lot 18) as well as Bloodline Series:  Comrade (Lot 162), and it is interesting to note the stylistic modifications that have transpired.  Although the saluting boy stands at attention, responding to the voice of authority like Zhang’s other characters, a more pronounced figural modeling of the face lends the youth a distinctive presence.  Indeed, the three dimensionality of his facial modeling is in contrast to the rest of his body.  That part of his identity not shielded by his uniform, of which the red tie is a beautiful flash of color, emerges as though from the haze of the past.  At the same time, however, with a painting entitled Bloodline Series:  Two Men (Lot 162, 2000), one sees Zhang’s re-assertion of the power of conformist identity, even in the post-‘Mao suit’ world of “business casual” dress.  For indeed, despite skin tone differences and physical size, one man appears to be the clone of the other – down to the detail of a slight cross of the eyes. 

In purely stylistic terms, Bloodline Series No. 7 (1997, Lot 19) and The Son or Boy from the “Family Series” (2005, Lot 20) offer a convenient, page-to-page stylistic comparison of Zhang’s work from different periods.  For example, one here sees the later, more aggressive sculptural modeling of the head, which is made possible by the representation of a dramatic light source that Zhang’s photographic stock imagery for work of the 1990s would not have provided.  Related to lighting is the changing nature and degree of narrative, that is, the drama of the scene:  the later figure goes beyond a rigidly frontal, mute pose and looks towards some activity beyond the viewer’s left shoulder with curiosity and, perhaps, a slight apprehension.  We also see in the later work a sharpening of the edges of the depicted form. 

While figural types may dominate within one period or another of Zhang’s practice, there is clearly development in his thinking about the representation of the human form – and the nature of representing identity in the rapidly changing Chinese context.  If we look to the differences in his own work over time, however, we may come to an allegorical reading of his broader theme, as well:  the persistence of difference, however minute, in the face of conformity. 

Also included in Sotheby’s spring sale are three black-and-white photographs of domestic interiors, indicating a new turn in Zhang Xiaogang’s work.  On top of these images, Zhang has written in script diaristic entries concerning the artist and his wife.  The Chinese characters that describe the pictures seem to float above the images, adding a more literally narrative element to traditional scenes of hearth and home.  This series, begun three years ago, suggests that the artist will continue to find new outlets for his creativity, which bodes well for this important artist’s future.

– Jonathan Goodman