Zhang Xiaogang

Biography

On the canvas “Two Comrades with Red Baby” (150 by 180 centimetres, National Gallery of Australia) two adults in identical clothes look at the viewer with unseeing eyes, and in the centre is a child painted in red. Their faces, hairstyles and expressions are almost indistinguishable. All three have a white patch on the left cheek, and all three are linked by a thin red line. The picture belongs to the series “Bloodline: The Big Family” and was painted from a black-and-white family photograph that the artist found in 1993 in his parents’ house.

Zhang Xiaogang himself said that he was after the effect of “false photographs”.

He was born in 1958 in Kunming, in Yunnan Province. His childhood and youth fell during the Cultural Revolution, and he later explained that for him it was a psychological state rather than a historical fact. In 1975 the watercolourist Lin Ling taught him watercolour and drawing, and early in 1976 Zhang, like many of his generation, was sent to work in the countryside. When China restored university entrance examinations, he entered the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in Chongqing, and from 1978 he studied oil painting there. The teachers still taught Revolutionary Realism, while Zhang and his fellow students turned away from political subjects towards Western philosophy and introspection. He graduated in 1982 and for several years worked on building sites and as art director of a dance troupe in Kunming; it was then that his series on life and death, “The Ghost Between Black and White”, appeared. Accounts differ as to whether he was given a teaching post straight after graduating; the more reliable version, to my mind, is that he began teaching only in 1988.

In 1985 he joined the New Wave, a movement that stirred Chinese culture in the mid-1980s. In 1986, together with Mao Xuhui, Pan Dehai, Ye Yongqing and more than eighty other artists, he founded the Southwest Art Group. The group stood for an “anti-urban regionalism”, explored the individual desires that, in Zhang’s words, had been suppressed by collectivist rationalisation, and organised its own self-funded exhibitions; these shows were one of the first steps of the Chinese avant-garde. In 1988 he became an instructor in the education department of the Sichuan Academy. In 1989 he took part in the exhibition “China/Avant-Garde” at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, and the academy’s gallery held his solo show “Lost in the Dreams”. Taking part in a 1991 exhibition in Pasadena devoted to the Chinese New Wave made him think about his own path, and he decided not to paint the way the famous Western masters paint.

The turning point came in 1992, after three months in Germany. He spent almost all his time in museums, studying Western painting, and thinking about what it meant to be a Chinese artist; the conclusion, in his words, was a single one: if he went on being an artist, he had to be an artist of China. On his return he worked in Mao Xuhui’s studio and chose Tiananmen Square as his first subject, painting it with broad, expressive brushstrokes. At the same time he began to study the faces of the people around him. The old family photographs he found at his parents’ home gave him the opening he had been looking for. He abandoned his earlier Surrealist manner and began to paint flatly, with a recognisable single eyelid; the first painting of the “Bloodline” series was “Mother and Son” (1993). Over time the figures grew more and more blurred, they were dressed in Mao suits, the faces lengthened and the eyes narrowed. The small patches of colour on these canvases are open to all kinds of interpretation. In the 2000s came “Father and Daughter”, in a light grey rather than a black palette, and the signs of the Mao era almost vanished from the pictures.

At the 22nd São Paulo Biennial in 1994 he won a bronze prize. In 1995 the “Bloodline” paintings were included in the exhibition “The Other Face: Three Chinese Artists” in the Italian Pavilion of the 46th Venice Biennale, and in 1996 he received a prize at the First Academic Exhibition of Chinese Contemporary Art. In the mid-1990s his work was shown in Brazil, France, Australia, Britain and the United States. Solo exhibitions followed in Paris (“Les Camarades”, 1999; “Amnesia and Memory”, 2003), New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul, Tampere and Prague (2008), and in 2009 at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane. His paintings feature prominently in the film “Sunflower” (2005). Richter, Picasso and Dalí are named among the artists he took his bearings from.

In recent years Zhang Xiaogang has also made sculptures: the characters of the “Big Family” have taken on three dimensions for the first time.