“It’s hard to directly face reality. I’m more used to self-reflection, and through that I found that I’m the kind of person who tries to avoid things — including my art, which is also this way, I always choose the path of avoidance. I am seeking to create an effect of ‘false photographs’ to re-embellish already ‘embellished’ histories and lives,” says the icon among contemporary Chinese painters, Zhang Xiaogang. Dressed in a pleasant pair of light blue jeans and a soft toned shirt, it is his quiet eyes that catch your attention.
Here sat the creator of a remarkable opus. One recalls Zhang’s description from the New York Times.
“If China’s art scene can be likened to a booming stock market, Zhang Xiaogang, 48, is its Google. More than any other Chinese artist Mr Zhang, with his huge paintings depicting family photographs taken during the Cultural Revolution, has captured the imagination of international collectors. Prices for his work have skyrocketed at auction over the last two years.
“When his work Bloodline Series: Comrade No. 120 sold for $979,000 at Sotheby’s auction in March, many art insiders predicted the market had topped out and prices would plummet within months.
“But in October, the British collector Charles Saatchi bought another of Mr Zhang’s pieces at Christie’s in London for $1.5 million. Then in November at Christie’s Hong Kong auction, Mr Zhang’s 1993 Tiananmen Square sold to a private collector for $2.3 million”.
A brilliant interview with the artist which was broadcast on television in Beijing, pans out his life, his studio and his leanings and learnings. Zhang says it was the self portrait of Vincent Van Gogh, which he saw in 1992, that touched something very deep within. He sat on the steps of the museum at Amsterdam, feeling “desperate and lonely”. The suffering Van Gogh became Zhang’s combustion for a genesis and solitude became sensory.
Later that afternoon, getting an exclusive seat opposite him at lunch, Zhang elucidates to The Asian Age about his works and his famous Bloodline Series. “The year was 1993. I was at my parents’ house and was looking through old pictures. I got my inspiration and began thinking about the Bloodline Series. I felt that through a family, especially a Chinese family, these old photographs reflected the greater society. We all live in one big family. Chinese people put a huge emphasis on the family. Family relations include those of blood, those who are your kin, in your job. You cannot leave these family, like relations. That left a deep impression on me. So from drawing family photographs, I wanted to reflect my understanding of life. But we live in a society that’s very contradictory. I wanted to express this relationship between the individual and society. This kind of relationship is like a son who disobeys his father, yet unable to leave his family behind. It’s a complicated relationship,” he says.
Family portraits in his home proved the ignition of composition. What interested the artist was the complexity of life and emotions behind the family scenes portrayed. The concept of a big family in China goes far beyond one’s immediate family and the ties of family blood. Collectivism is an inherent part of Chinese social history and the ties of social and cultural blood are very strong forces indeed.
Zhang spoke about his artistic thought before he began a painting. “Excitement and anxiety spring out in me. l think of an idea, and draw a small sketch. Then I see how I want to proceed. The canvas before me is never blank, because all the thoughts are in my head. This thinking process takes a few days. The canvas is my stimulus,” he says. But after finishing a work he says he doesn’t want to look at it for days.
Zhang creates a sense of nostalgia and utilises the conventions of the traditional Chinese photographer. Like his photographic predecessors, he uses dramatic lighting effects and flat anonymous backgrounds to idealise his subjects. In his works, the figures are painted with a smooth pearly finish reminiscent of porcelain, but are lacking in emotion and turn detached faces to the world, almost like clones.
To him the artist, these faces are representative of a society striving to exist in an increasingly commodifed and dehumanised world. The comrades hide their individual personalities and histories behind the facade of a standardised portrait. Zhang Xiaogang pursues a deeply personal, allegorical painting style, directing his academic training towards an attempt to address a kind of collective Chinese “spirit”, one that transcends and yet is not quite exempt from the vagaries and traumas of history.
“From the earliest stages of my career I sought to develop a visual symbolic system that could encompass both extremes of personal as well as collective experience. I drew from religious, surrealist, and nativist traditions, a fusion that moved towards creating a vernacular Chinese art, independent of the strictures of ‘official’, state-sanctioned aesthetic production, and one dialectically engaged with the issues confronting the country. You will also see deep melancholy in my paintings marked by themes of martyrdom, mourning, and sacrifice,” he says.
Zhang says it was humanistic concerns that led him towards portraiture. His approach to portraiture represents his ongoing synthesis of Eastern and Western aesthetic traditions. In his paintings the artist captures the superficial homogeneity of the collectivity through the smooth, unblemished faces and evenly staring eyes — touched up as they would have been in the photographers’ studio. Small idiosyncrasies surface — a crossed eye, thick framed glasses, a mole, imperfect teeth or a wisp of hair gone astray, reveal individual differences. And Zhang says, “When we live in a big family, the first thing we learn is how to shut ourselves up in a secret small cell and pretend to keep step with all the other members of the family.”
Paradoxes prevail even in his titles — one series is named Amnesia and Memory, which deal with the workings of memory. Another series is called Shadows in the Soul. He says, “Memory can be selective and often inaccurate. I picked up elements from very early work prior to 1993, light bulbs, and open books with writing, pens, etc. Also, I created large scale canvasses of great empty urban scenes where the weight of recollection is palpable.”
“People’s lives are changing quickly, so now we’re facing our memory and our memory loss, which all results in a number of psychological reactions. So it seems that by creating pieces concerned with memory — since our lives are changing so fast, resulting in a constant loss of our memory and nostalgia — it all comes back to how I was always concerned with the idea of memory, an idea that has concerned me even more in recent years.”