Zhang Linhai

Schoeni Art Gallery, Hong Kong
Acquired by the present owner from the above

The work is in generally very good condition. There is some minor soiling in the bottom left corner of the canvas, and the work can benefit from a cleaning. Otherewise, there are no condition problems with this work.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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The seminal art critic Li Xianting comes from the same village, Wang Jin Zhuang, in She County, as Zhang Linhai, and according to Li, Zhang is "a timid, modest man, incapable of being puckish, so his work retains a quiet, subtle style." Indeed, it is both enigmatic and underappreciated. Born in Shanghai in 1963, Zhang has spent the majority of his life as an invalid. Catching cold while visiting his grandmother in a nearby village, the young Zhang contracted five diseases that brought him close to death. At the end of 1967, he was brought to the Children's Hospital of Bejing, his parents selling half their property to gain enough money to pay for their son's treatment. The child survived but was permanently crippled.

Early in 1969, the six-year old Zhang copied a picture of Chairman Mao in school, a forbidden act during the Cultural Revolution. As a result, his mother and father were interrogated, and his father was forced to wear a dunce cap and a large board around his neck while being publicly humiliated by both adults and children. Wang was overwhelmed by this scene. He wrote: "When the child sees that [his father's] driving dignity is bullied and humiliated, a feeling of loneliness and helplessness ensues that is comparable to the destruction of the whole world. That scene was enough to push a delicate mind to the edge of sanity."

From 1986 to 1990, Zhang attended the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts where, in his third and forth years, he created two series of engravings, "The Strange Northern Wild" and "The Preaching of Buddha." The latter sequence was awarded top honors in an important Shanghai exhibition and subsequently collected by the Shanghai Museum in 1991. Despite his ongoing physical handicaps, the artist has persevered. His own son was born in August 2001, and Zhang continues today his series of works based on memory and childhood. In Reminiscences Series No. 17, a large oil on canvas work of 2006, Zhang portrays a group of six boys watching a seventh run towards the right side of the canvas, all of them painted in the same drab clothing. All the children are bald with very large heads, but their faces are mostly obscured; indeed, they could be multiple versions of the same child. Sitting on a stone bench and gazing back towards receding space, the children are enveloped in what appear to be the shadows cast by wintry branches. In this somber, literally retrospective work, the only hint of warmth is the repeated red of the young boys' neck ties. 

In Sea No. 3, a smaller work of 2004, Zhang paints three identical naked children, diving or perhaps falling head first into a frothy sea. So precisely aligned are these peculiar diving figures, almost mutant-like in their figural construction, that their descent seems synchronized and purposive. Zhang's Academy degree was in engraving, and something of that medium's linear precision emerges in these enigmatic paintings, whose restrained tonalities and unusual subject matter indirectly reference the harshness of Zhang's own early years.

-Jonathan Goodman