Zhang Xiaogang

signed in Chinese and dated 2006

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

London, Saatchi Gallery, The Revolution Continues: New Chinese Art, 2008, pp. 232-233, illustrated in colour  

Generally in good condition
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Zhang Xiaogang's work has rightfully attracted markedly different, if equally vigorous, types of attention over the past two decades.  His images tell the story of an artist finding his pictorial and psychological way against the background of a society and an art world in constant flux.  As an artist, he exemplifies the first wave of Chinese contemporary artists emerging from the debris of the Cultural Revolution.  While some of Zhang Xiaogang's work may have come to stand canonically for the struggles of his generation, his oeuvre marks a creative trajectory more deeply rooted in personal experience than political symbolism. 

In an August 1993 letter to curator Wang Lin published in the humble catalogue accompanying an exhibition rather quaintly entitled Chinese Fine Arts in 1990s: Experiences in Fine Arts of China held that year in Chongqing, Zhang wrote of his creative outlook:

"Looking back on my work in the last decade or so, I am clear on the fact that I am an internal monologue' artist. I made a trip around Europe, and now back in my tiny studio, this feeling is stronger than ever. I could never become a 'cultural' artist, even less an 'experimental' artist. My art comes from my inner experience."

This sort of inner monologue is visible and features centrally in Zhang's compositions.  While his 1980s work intrigues, it is his output of the immediate early 1990s made in that brief period after the China/Avant-Garde Exhibition of 1989, but before the surge of post-Tian'anmen Western interest in Chinese contemporary art had truly made itself felt, that we see his true emergence.  The style pioneered by Zhang Xiaogang in these mid-1990s paintings then evolved into a durable vocabulary that would ground his works well into the new decade.

Lots 718 and 719 from 2005 and 2006 respectively, show how Zhang's more recent creation has continued to interestingly explore the issues of family, character, and history first set upon in his initial Bloodlines canvases.  Comrade (Diptych) (Lot 718), an oil on canvas diptych, depicts a bespectacled youth juxtaposed next to his feminine counterpart. The painting retains the basic figurative conventions of the artist's contemporary works on canvas, but employs a markedly lighter palette. These two subjects may be siblings, completely unrelated or even dueling personas of the same single individual.  (Zhang's mother, who suffered from schizophrenia, is among the artist's deepest inspirations.)  Afflicted by red patches and connected by the red strands that curator Johnson Chang dubbed "Bloodlines", (a name that has come to refer to both this and the Bloodline series) both stare out at the viewer, unfazed.  Untitled (Lot 719), oil on canvas work from 2006 depicting a close-up of a male head obscured by a pink patch is an excellent example of Zhang's later adaptations of his original motifs.  In these works, single heads consume entire canvases, their postures and colours echoing the red and yellow babies of a decade earlier, now speaking of a psychology more individual than collective.