Lot 1046
  • 1046

Zhang Xiaogang

Estimate
16,000,000 - 25,000,000 HKD
bidding is closed

Description

  • Zhang Xiaogang
  • Bloodline : Big Family No. 13
  • oil on canvas
  • 190 by 150 cm.; 74⅞ by 59½ in.
signed in Chinese and English and dated 1996, framed

Provenance

Private American Collection

Exhibited

Faces and Bodies of the Middle Kingdom: Chinese Art of the 90's, Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, Czech, 13 March - 1 June, 1997
Chinese Painting: Zhang Xiaogang
, Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, Czech, 25 September - 28 December, 2008, unpaginated

Literature

Zhang Xiaogang, Bloodline: The Big Family, Art Gallery at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China, 1997, pp. 31-32
Umbilical Cord of History: Paintings by Zhang Xiaogang, Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong, China, 2004, p. 93

Condition

This work is generally in good condition. Having examined the work under ultraviolet light, there appears to be no evidence of restoration. Please note that it was not examined out of its frame.
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Catalogue Note

From Individualism to Collectivism

Zhang Xiaogang

 

Produced between 1993 and 2002, Bloodline: Big Family series by Zhang Xiaogang can without a doubt be considered to be the emblem of contemporary Chinese art, as it fully encapsulates the unspoken trauma, collective spirit, and public memory of the Chinese people under the burden of the past. Numerous art curators and critics such as Johnson Chang and Li Xianting have especially praised the brilliant reinvention of Western stylistic techniques and intellectual observation of the Chinese society in the series to be a distinctive factor that sets Zhang apart from other artists of his time. Created in 1996, Bloodline: Big Family No. 13 (Lot 1046) pictures a mother and her son. While continuing the examination of history and Chinese ethical relationships of the larger Bloodline: Big Family series, this painting features more gender-neutral characters and represents a step towards uniformization. It thus demonstrates subtle but crucial transformations in Zhang Xiaogang’s thinking between the early and the late works in Bloodline: Big Family series, from a focus on individuals to a more encompassing vision of an entire people.

 

The painting shows a somewhat gender-ambiguous woman in a Mao suit and a red infant in front of her. In 1994, Zhang Xiaogang’s first wife gave birth to their daughter Huanhuan, who radically redirected Zhang’s life and influenced his art. Bloodline: Big Family No. 12 of 1996 was a portrait of a father and a daughter, who was based on Huanhuan, and Bloodline: Big Family No. 13 of the same year portrays a mother and an infant, likewise treating birth as a theme. Interestingly, in referring to images of Zhang Xiaogang’s mother and of himself as an infant, No. 13 was an occasion for the artist to reflect on his intimate relationship to his mother. In fact, Zhang’s mother had served several times as a prototype behind his paintings of the early 1990’s. Her suffering during the Cultural Revolution, which was also a metaphor for the historical trauma of the period, became the main theme of the Bloodline: Big Family series. Instrumental in forging this theme, No. 13 and No. 12 allowed the Bloodline Big Family series to continue and evolve.

 

The woman in a green Mao suit, the ruddy-faced infant, and the gray nondescript background all connect the early and late works in the Bloodline: Big Family series. The famous art critic Li Xianting has described the signature gray palette, the smooth painting surface, and the expressionless figures as a manifestation of the spiritual dilemmas of the Chinese during the Cultural Revolution, “These portraits are infused with a uniquely Chinese pathos—always cheated and mistreated by fate, or even suffering unpredictable political upheavals, they remain as calm as water and self-sustaining.”1 The dominant colours of green and red inject a social and historical significance into the painting. The green Mao suit symbolizes an era and bears witness to the foregone past. Red, on the other hand, is clearly the colour of the Communist Party, which had governed China for almost half a century. During the Cultural Revolution, every figment of individual character would be stripped away, and the Revolutionary Mao suit was everybody’s uniform. An entire nation’s people were dressed in the same colour for the same appearance. China became a substantively homogeneous body, unified against the West. Painting this condition in a new era, Zhang Xiaogang here expresses his fine-grained and empathetic appreciation for the fragmented past.

 

The homogeneity and collectivism mentioned above inhere not only in the palette, but also in the facial features of the two figures in Bloodline: Big Family Series No. 13. Their almost identical facial expressions and contours are clever devices that drift away from the recognisable characters in Zhang’s early portraits of his friends and family members. According to the artist himself, “What I really want to paint is not a personal portrait, but rather a form or a symbol of a person. It does not matter whether it is a man or a woman, what age or identity. Every person I paint in the Bloodline: Big Family series is really the same person. They can be in different costumes, have different haircuts, wear glasses or not, be male or female, but essentially they are the same person.”2 What Zhang attempted to portray was no longer a single individual, but the face of Chinese people. Probably unbeknownst to Zhang at the time, this reproduction of androgynous figures as seen in the work on offer and throughout his later series such as Amnesia and Memory would later become one of the most important iconographies in contemporary Chinese art.

 

Born in 1958 in Kunming and graduated from Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 1982, Zhang Xiaogang had gone through several major exploratory periods before finally gaining the iconic status as one of the top contemporary Chinese artists with his breakthrough Bloodline: Big Family series. Inspired in the beginning by the works of Van Gogh, Zhang had experienced predominantly with Western artistic currents such as expressionism in his early career, most notably represented by his graduation work Grassland. The period immediately following his graduation from 1982 to 1985 was famously coined by the artist as the “Dark Era”. During this time, he suffered from depression and ill health after being rejected from a teaching position at his alma mater and had no choice but to work as an “art designer” at the Kunming Opera Troupe. His subsequent alcohol abuse had led to his eventual two- month hospitalization for alcohol-caused stomach bleeding. It was during these two months on the hospital bed when Zhang finally had a quiet unperturbed moment to self-reflect on his private feelings and the fear of death. The ghost-like patients witnessed by the artist and the motif of dream also became a powerful source of inspiration for his works produced after 1984, such as the Phantom and Lost Dream series. In a way, the origin of the lifeless emotion and surreal dream-like flair as seen in the figures in Bloodline: Big Family series can certainly be attributed to this life changing experience.

 

While the themes of his works in the 1980s and early 90s focused primarily on depicting dreamy soliloquies in expressionistic and surrealist styles, it was truly the political turmoil of 1989 that had awakened Zhang Xiaogang to reality. “I had some serious reflections and wrote many things. I felt that if I continued to paint in the same way, I could become one of a million people imitating Western art. However good I was at this, I could only distinguish myself among copycats. I still wouldn’t be a true and independent artist.”3 In this malaise and disorientation, Zhang received a timely invitation to the University of Kassel for a short-temp academic exchange, and in May 1993 left for Germany, where his wife Tang Lei was studying. He could not have foreseen the influence of this brief sojourn on his subsequent artistic career.

 

It was during these three months in Germany where Zhang finally had the opportunity to immerse himself in the art world outside. It was an eye-opening journey yet also one that fully and finally grounded his determination to move onto a whole new path. “I looked from the ‘early phase’ to the present for a position for myself, but even after this I still didn’t know who I was. But an idea did emerge clearly: if I continue being an artist, I have to be an artist of ‘China.’”4

 

It was after discovering his old family photographs back home, when Zhang unraveled the link between collective memory and painting.  “I could see a way to paint the contradictions between the individual and the collective and it was from this that I started really to paint. There’s a complex relationship between the state and the people that I could express by using the Cultural Revolution. China is like a family, a big family. Everyone has to rely on each other and to confront each other. This was the issue I wanted to give attention to and, gradually, it became less and less linked to the Cultural Revolution and more to people’s states of mind.”  

 

Zhang gave birth to the Bloodline: Big Family series in the summer of 1993 in his hometown Kunming. While the early works in 1993 still retained drips of expressionistic influence, as evident in the brick-like borders, it was in 1994 when a more mature and definite style was established. The infusion of the symbolic thin red line, awkward light patch that spoke of time passage, and rigid posture of the figures was a key for Zhang to express and explore the ambiguous “familial” relationships between an individual and his country, family members, and even oneself, all in relation to the omnipresent history. In a way, these symbols, especially the flat facial expressions, have captured the very essence of a historical drama (or even trauma) of how the building up of a prosperous and affluent contemporary society from the embers of a revolution leads one to reflect on its turbulent and tragic past. As Zhang has said, “I repeated one ‘beautiful’ face after another. Superficially they are as calm as water, but their psyches are fraught with all kinds of complex emotions.”5

Umbilical Cord of History: Paintings by Zhang Xiaogang, Hanart TZ Gallery, 2004

2 Ed. Lv Peng, Zhang Xiaogang, Sichuan Fine Arts Publishing House, 2007

3 Extract from “Dialogue with Zhang Xiaogang” in Materials of the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art from 1980 – 1990, Asia Art Archive, 2009

4 Refer to 3

5 Refer to 1