Zhang Xiaogang

Schoeni Art Gallery, Hong Kong

"Zhang [Xiaogang] is one of a generation deeply affected by incidents at Tiananmen Square - painters who pictorially critique Chinese life. However, unlike the openly satiric, quasi-Pop paintings he and others made in the 1980s, which included comic portrayals of Mao, commentary now is more veiled. In these works, there is a Photo-Realist exactitude: Zhang draws from the outmoded conventions of 1920s family photographic portraiture, a commercial form suppressed under the Communist regime. But he alters aspects of his images. He may tint one figure a certain hue, or diagonally tilt a subject's position on the canvas .... He often swaps gender characteristics to make men and women seem almost neutered; he has described this maneuver as indicating, among other things, an oppressive degree of uniformity imposed by current Chinese society."

Carey Lovelace, ‘Zhang Xiaogang at Max Protetch’, in Art in America, 2001