Zhang Xiaogang

Galerie de France, Paris (acquired directly from the artist's studio in 2005)
Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above)
Christie's New York, 16 November 2006, lot 365
Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

The work is in good condition. There are rubbing marks associated with general handling at extreme corners and edges. Upon close inspection, there is a horizontal hairline scuff between the figure's eyebrows. Under ultraviolet light inspection, 4 clustered pinhole-sized dots fluoresce, about 15.5cm from the left edge and 68cm from the bottom edge; they are not visible under the naked eye. The work is framed.
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What is memory if not the Living Spirit? Human existence conserves representations of its past. How strange a weakness then is forgetfulness. This disappearance of memory. This brainwash.
Caroline Puel, Forget and Remember, introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Galerie de France, Paris, Mai 2003

Zhang Xiaogang has always addressed personal memory as a central theme in his works, often reflecting the collective memory of the Chinese cultural identity of his generation. “What I do is to represent the individual within history. What I want to look at is the state of the individual within history as well as the relationship between the individual and the collective.” The personal history of Zhang’s subjects – families, comrades or the anonymous – does not critique history per se, but rather places the living conditions of the individual against the great backdrop of history. As exemplified by the artist’s famed Bloodline: Big Family series, these personal histories amount to a haunting psychological portrait of a generation of Chinese people poised between a past of devastating turmoil and a future whose outlines no one knows. However, the history of individuality – a less politicized reading of Zhang Xiaogang’s oeuvre – is no less significant as that of the collective, as often suggested by Zhang’s later Amnesia and Memory series. 

In the 1990s, Zhang discovered, in old family portrait photographs, a standpoint from which to narrate his personal history, and began the Bloodline: Big Family series. "Old family photos and those charcoal drawings you see everywhere on the streets of China... touched my heart... Perhaps because even today those old images not only satisfy people's love of reminiscence, but also contain a simple directness and a unique visual language" (the artist cited in: Lorenzo Sassoli De Bianchi, From Heaven to Earth, Chinese Contemporary Painting, Bologna 2008, p. 243). Though reminiscent of vintage photographs of Zhang’s own family members, the canvasses channel the stringent sensibilities of the era - the formality of pose and seriousness of attitude projected by the sitters evoke an attitude of careful self-presentation. Though displaying a calm, detached exterior, these portraits hint at a tumult of melancholy held at bay behind a screen of blank eyes. Very much attuned to this by-gone era via the link of photography, Zhang Xiaogang’s work owes a pronounced debt to Gerhard Richter’s Photo Paintings in the 1960s. Richter’s detached painterly confrontation of Germany’s cultural baggage as mediated by photography forms a convincing precedent for Zhang’s own seemingly dispassionate response to China’s recent political history.

The Amnesia and Memory series, began in 2002, marked Zhang’s move away from grand history, from what was seen as an expression of the Chinese past and consciousness, to the bare individual. This new series featured portraits of single persons and focused on faces, concealing all recognisable background. Despite the similarity of the paintings, Zhang sometimes portrayed a beautiful woman or a young man—a character who clearly transcends the apparent sameness of the artist’s usual subjects and seems to come to life with a vivid individuality.  In such cases – Amnesia and Memory No.10 from 2004 is an exquisite example – the close-up cropping of the figure’s calm countenance and almost-sculptural figural modeling defy the standardized monochrome treatment.  The closed eyes deny the viewer any direct psychological engagement with the subject. Instead, the cropping of the figure and the focus on the eyes draw the figure into a dream-like space, exempt from the conformity that had previously been imposed on so many of Zhang’s subjects. The shimmering teardrops at the corner of his eyes are telling evidence of an ongoing dream – albeit tumultuous – that no one else can interfere.

Zhang’s works of the early 2000s are characterised by a stronger surrealistic tendency and sense of dreamy ambiguity, a tilt away from the rigid perpendiculars of earlier compositions, and a dreamy blurring of figures that brings the uncertainty of memory directly to the painting’s surface. “Images of past life gradually have become distant in the present reality in which I live, but at the same time are more pressing in my dreams. I thus am often unable to tell clearly whether they truly belong to the past or are a drama being staged in the present.”(Zhang Xiaogang, Artist’s Statement, 2003) The seemingly rigid figures began to display, perhaps concurrently with the opening of the Chinese society, a growing need for individuality and emotional expression, thus alluding to the slow urge towards overcoming uniform thinking. Meanwhile, Zhang’s patient brushstrokes remains poignantly affecting and continue to confound our desire to untangle the threads of memory.