Author: ZHANG XIAOGANG 张晓刚
Size: 28×28cm
Signed and dated: Painted in 1987
Estimate:
Final Price: RMB 700,000
LITERATURE
2016 Zhang Xiaogang Works Literature and Research 1981-2014 Volume I / P251 / Sichuan Fine Arts Publishing House
2021 The History of New Painting / P41 / Shanghai Calligraphy And Painting Publishing House
signed in Chinese and dated 1987 in Chong Qing, sealed
Hidden Memory Narratives
With his art career and works, Zhang Xiaogang has not just made a name for himself as a special case in contemporary Chinese art history, but has also given expression to the values of a prominent artist in the settings of his era. Based on his personal career and memory, he paints to narrate personal experiences, stories and emotion. Zhang extracts, reorganizes and converts what’s emotional and liberal from typical imagery in history and reality, in collective and personal memory, endows the general historical experience of a generation with a whole-new visual form and vitality.
Zhang has always found his works on the quest of history, memory and the present. Be it either Consanguinity: An Extended Family, an early series which made him world-known, or Memory Loss and Memory and Green Wall, a series he began to explore sine 2000, he depicts imagery at the heart of his memory time and again in constant quest of the sense of ego and history. Zhang paints from old pictures to narrate his memory and lead people into a virtual space where reading, perception and association predominate. Reading the world under his brushstrokes is like opening the door on the outside to the innermost part of memory. There is a highly narrative avenue in place to make the visitors empathetic with the works.
Zhang refers to the period from 1986 to 1989 as his “outlandish period”. From 1986 onwards he delved into Eastern mysticism, pays attention to the non-action philosophy of Laozi and Zhuangzi while pursues a keen interest in chan. The new focuses and interest purposely added something mystic and religious to his works at the time. Dream, created in 1987, reflects his perspective on various phases of his art and life and the mode of thinking. It is a combination of many elements also seen in his other paintings created in this period. For example, he tried introducing the green mountains and clear rivers to Buddhists in 1986. The white creases and folds on the goddesses’ dresses, representing the typical imagery in Zhang’s “abyssal period”, blend smoothly into the undulating mountain. In style, the four goddesses resemble, to quite a great extent, the god of mountains in his God of Mountains and His Friends. The woman in red in the foreground faces the visitors, with the goddesses departing in an opposite direction. In this respect, the painting testifies to a maxim of Heidegger: “Thus the gods walked away, leaving the resulting void to be filled by the history of mythology and psychological exploration.
In Zhang’s words, he “fled from the inferno and roved into the world of gods in an attempt to seek the nature of the riddle of life and death as well as an inclusive constant law of art”. This suggests an intense sense of life in the works he created at the time. Very different from the then long-prevailing realist art principles, his style provides a spiritual sensuous makeup for the then art mainstream. Strong subjectivity underlying the canvas suggests the painter is intentionally exploring the non-rational significance of life. This work does more than imply his career and philosophy in the 80s; in a sense it provided the painter with a path to the then humanist China, hence its dual value in art and history.
Boy No.2, created in 2012, is a serial to Consanguinity: An Extended Family and Memory Loss and Memory series in respect of the components of imagery and the subject, yet retaining Magritte’s irrationality and Chirico’s mysticism. The boy in a green sweater and a white shirt is set in a gray and brown background, his head slightly lifted and gaze still. The painting is the most engaging of Zhang’s works in that the boy’s cold, elusive features suggest an “expression of the past”. His void gaze and seeming reverie suggest an unaccountable absence of mind and meditation when set in the dim background. A light spot on his face makes the painting look as if a dreamland into which the boy intrudes. The work metaphorizes the intrusion of the present on the past, a “continual revision” to the memory.
Girl No.2, a work contemporaneous with Boy No.2, features an identical simple style. The adolescent youngster gazes into the distance, her right hand raised. As the focus of the subject, her vivid eyes are brimming with emotion and the desire to speak. Meantime, she looks as if exchanging gazes with the visitors-there’s no masking or aversion. When their gaze meets, something of an implicit, touching spiritual tension comes out of the visual and mental exposure and conflict. That explains how Zhang succeeded in shattering photographist stillness while injecting a striking humanistic element into the painting.
Zhang is frank about his works. He remarked that his interest “is in introducing a dialogue between history and reality and a relationship between the individual and the society”. According to Zhang, whereas he never paints the modern society, he strives to portray the inner world of his contemporaries. He likes to paint the various conflicts between the society or people and the “past tense”, signifies that he does not focus on the individuals, but how his contemporaries, as a whole, face history and the loss of memory. Therefore, memory is no longer synonymous with nostalgia or emotional aesthetics, but a “mental, spiritual disease” typical of a group of people. That’s how Zhang has torn off a slip from the collective loss of memory in history for us to rethink and experience memory itself.
