Zhang Xiaogang
Zhang Xiaogang, 2007
"During the Tough times, I gave up a lot of chances to earn money because I love art so much," Zhang Xiaogang
Zhang Xiaogang no longer has to worry about being pressured into accommodating the market - he has a clause written into his contract with art dealers precluding any discussion of subject matter and style. He is very grounded for an artist who's work sells at auction for seven figures. He chain smokes like most Chinese men, dresses casual chic - sporting a Polo baseball cap. His work is everywhere - it hangs in the entrance hall of the Asia Society in Manhattan and it was the first artwork seen on entering the 2008 China International Gallery Exposition, in the Phillips de Pury stall. His paintings are the only ones deemed worthy of a protective rope at the National Gallery of Art in Beijing.
Unlike much of the contemporary realistic painting in China today, Zhang Xiaogang's work is sincere, and touches a sensitive, maybe even uncomfortable chord in people, drawing attention to an unhappy time that many here in China would prefer to forget. His work is not political though. His paintings of family photographs speak to a state of mind and move beyond locating a cause or pointing a finger at any person or entity.
The anti-commercialism of Zhang Xiaogang's vision has backfired in that happy and rare circumstance of catapulting him to international Art Star status. His obsession with both western art and finding a distinctively Chinese identity in his work comes across in the simplicity of his concept and its execution.
A recurring theme in Chinese narratives of the last 50 years is the brutal and blunt difficulty of day-to-day living - a reality that has only recently begun to change. Zhang Xiaogang's experience follows this path, punctuated by a series of fortuitous and revelatory coincidences. His parents worked for the government, and though Zhang is a native Beijinger, the family had to move numerous times when he was a child, including a stint in the country being "re-educated" during the Cultural Revolution. For two years, Zhang worked the land - "everyone in my high school had to work hard, very hard, and just to earn enough to eat - the same as the farmers." With some mentoring in basic art techniques from a sympathetic teacher while in high school, Zhang was mostly self-taught. He passed his exams and studied oil painting, the inevitable socialist realism, at the Sichuan Academy of Art.
Three years into his drab art studies, the library at his college was re-opened and Zhang discovered western painting. Cubism and surrealism left a lasting impression. The idea of manipulating the proportions of the body and face, especially with a very subtle and haunting aesthetic, would become a major facet of Zhang's most successful work (to date). El Greco's elongated human forms and de Chirico's lonely panoramas were epiphanies, but it was Picasso that permanently altered Zhang's painting. His work from this time is particularly referential to Picasso's etchings, drawings and early painting, with a Dali-esque and Klee-like symbolistic edge.
In 1992 Zhang was able to leave China and visit northern Europe for three months. It was an ascetic odyssey for him, one that was thrown off-course by a visit to Documenta in Kassel. "It was totally different, and initially I was confused, but it helped me to find my own language in art."
"When I came back I tried to find a bridge between Chinese contemporary art and myself - something related to my own life." Like Richter before him, Zhang found a mystical poetry in the transformation of photography into oil paintings. Unlike Richter, who had also found himself forced into the mold of socialist realism, Zhang's new-comer outlook on western art history compelled him to add a distinctive style to his oil reproductions of the photographs. The symbolism and graphic quality of his work gave way to a new style powerfully influenced by Picasso's Blue Period.
While his technique began to coalesce, Zhang also discovered his subject. He began using family photographs as models for his imagery. "I found some old photographs that were fascinating, they reflected a very enigmatic time for the Chinese people, from the fifties to the seventies." Zhang is not overtly political; his interests lie more in the commonality of attitude and experience. As he began to work with the faces, identities began to merge, and disintegrate. The brush strokes melted through careful blending, creating a seamless surface. The highlights on the eyes became regular and glascine. There is an identical vacantness in the individuals that certainly existed in the originals, but is emphasized in the paintings, begging the question, what was going on at the time that would reduce people to these vacant, not even qualifiable as serious or posed, emotionless expressions? There is even an element of self-portrait in the faces. "I was trying to define the relationship between person-family-society-myself."
The "Big Family" and the succeeding "Bloodlines" series of paintings were criticized for their lack of any obvious expressionistic flourishes. Zhang allowed himself only two signature gestures. The more didactic of the two is the small red line connecting the figures in the image to each other, and then meandering off the side of the canvas, ostensibly to rope in the viewer. The second class of details, and the more emotionally charged, are the irregular spots of color, seemingly falling on the faces like the sun through the trees, and occasionally enveloping an entire head. Zhang found this visual cue in the photographs themselves. The original owners added color to various figures in the pictures. Yet with no knowledge of the family's history or the reasoning behind these color appliques, the hand coloring appears as random emphasis on a brother over a sister, or a wife over a husband. In his painting though, Zhang interprets these color anomalies as momentary bursts of hope and passion seeping through the morose facade of ghastly everyday existence.
Zhang's paintings became popular first in Europe and America - they found their way into international art fairs abroad and were an instant sensation. In 1997 Zhang was able to give up his 200 RMB-a-month (about $150 today) teaching position at the Sichuan Academy of Art. His immense success has had a somewhat hollow resonance at home. Though his work was immediately embraced by a younger audience in China, it is largely appreciated by the art establishment in China for its monetary success overseas, the primary barometer for determining the "quality" of art.
Some days Zhang has eight different meetings, with collectors, dealers and the press. He finds he can spend only fifty percent of his working time in the studio. But he still clings to the attitude that first enabled him to produce profoundly engaging paintings: "People's opinions have never affected me, I know exactly what I want to do."
Special thanks to Wang Yang for his assistance in translation.
Will Corwin is an artist and curator from New York City, currently based in Beijing doing a residency with the Red Gate Gallery. He has curated visual art exhibitions for the AugustArt art festival in New York and the Flushing Town Hall in Queens, a Smithsonian Affiliate. He has shown at the LaMama Gallery in NYC, Gallery Aferro in Newark, and has done site-specific projects with chashama and the Theater for the New City in New York, The Taipei Artists Village, Taipei, and Red Gate Gallery and the Pickled Art Center in Beijing. He is also involved with Smartspace NYC. He currently teaches with the Meet the Met program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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