Zhang Xiaogang

This work is in generally very good conditon overall. There are some holes in the wood that seem original to the work.There are no apparent condition problems with this work. Otherwise there are no apparent condition problems with this work.
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Zhang Xiaogang: The Shadow in My Soul

Zhang Xiaogang's work has rightfully attracted two markedly different, if equally vigorous, kinds of attention over the past two decades. Widely debated in domestic avant-garde circles since the 1980's, his work was later championed by the first round of international curators to become interested in Chinese contemporary art in the years immediately after the incidents at Tiananmen Square in 1989. More recently, Zhang's work has come to symbolize the strength and dynamism of the market for Chinese contemporary art.

Sotheby's is proud to offer seven lots by Zhang Xiaogang, which collectively present a comprehensive and thrilling picture of the artist's development over two decades, from 1985 to 2004. Collectively, these works tell the story of an artist finding his pictorial and psychological way amidst a society and an art world in constant flux; individually they represent each of the artist's major periods. While some of Zhang's work has come to stand like an icon for the struggles of his post-Cultural Revolution generation, these seven lots highlight a creative trajectory more deeply rooted in personal experience than political of socio-cultural symbolism.

In an August 1993 letter to curator Wang Lin, published in a humble catalogue accompanying the quaintly titled Chongqing exhibition Chinese Fine Arts in 1990s: Experiences in Fine Arts of China, Zhang wrote of his creative outlook as follows:  "Looking back on my work in the last decade or so, I am clear on the fact that I am an 'internal monologue' artist. I made a trip around Europe, and now back in my tiny studio, this feeling is stronger than ever. I could never become a 'cultural' artist, even less an 'experimental' artist. My art comes from my inner experience."

This sort of inner monologue is visible in Zhang's New Moon (1985, Lot 87), painted shortly after the artist's emergence from the tight-knit community of the Oil Painting Department at the Sichuan Academy. 1985 was a pivotal year in Zhang's maturation: he was on his own, estranged from his father (who disagreed with his son's choice of art as profession), and struggling with health problems that had left him hospitalized for two months the previous year. As a scene painter assigned to a song and dance troupe based in Chongqing—a job he was fortunate to get, as it meant he did not have to return permanently to his native Kunming—Zhang felt directionless and far removed from the heady intellectual exchanges of his student days. An extraordinary example of the artist's early style, this rare work at once echoes the explicitly imitative Post-Impressionism of Zhang's student years and prefigures in texture and coloration the portraiture techniques he would set upon in the coming decade. From the Symbolist leanings of the 1985 work we move to the almost Surrealist Untitled oil on paper work of 1989, which features a naked woman in a deserted landscape and a strange assortment of details, most notably the reddish severed head poised atop a pedestal-like plant. One sees quite a diversity in Zhang's practice from 1985-89, but this marks the end of this particular period of Zhang's output.

While Zhang's 1980's work intrigues, it is his painting of the mid-1990's for which he is best known. By about 1996, Zhang Xiaogang had grown into the artistic persona he had envisioned for himself back in Chongqing. The famous Bloodlines series began as a series of isolated portraits based on old photographs; only later did the works evolve into a signature style. The smaller single-figure portraits offered here - Bloodline Series No. 8 (1997, Lot 90) and Bloodline Series Young Man (1996, Lot 92) - show the pictorial basis for the series as a whole, while the larger Bloodline Series: Big Family No. 8 (1996, Lot 89) pictures one of the artist's more typical assemblages of two figures. Afflicted by yellow patches and connected by the meandering red strands that curator Johnson Chang dubbed "Bloodlines" (a name that has come to refer to both the Bloodlines and the related Comrade series), the pair of male figures are unfazed, peering out at the viewer with a hauntingly blank gaze.

The style pioneered by Zhang Xiaogang in these mid-1990's paintings evolved into a durable vocabulary that would ground the artist's works well into the new decade. Zhang's more recent creation has continued to explore the issues of family, character, and history that were first put forth in his initial Bloodlines canvases, but his more recent style has a fluidity and refinement that one rarely sees in the mid-90's works. The exquisite Green Army Uniform (2002, Lot 153) offered in the afternoon session, for example, features a solitary full figure in a green uniform against a considerably more expansive gray background.

2001 No. 8 (Lot 154) is a grand descendant of the mid-1990's work, in which a new color language and more sculptural figural forms are powerfully asserted. In contrast to the 1996 pair, the male and female figure of 2001 seem to come less from the real world of photographic snapshots than from an idealized world of the artist's fertile imagination. A primitive simplicity characterizes the modeling of these epic figures, as their sculptural presence is defined with geometric precision. Untethered from the bloodlines of the mid-90's, their naked shoulders visible, the figures of No. 8 body forth an almost Edenic composure, as though they were incarnations of the first man and woman before the fall. And yet the patches of color, here in a light pink, remain from Zhang's earlier practice. 2001 No. 8 is a quintessential example of Zhang Xiaogang's grandeur on a monumental scale.

In 1993, Zhang Xiaogang described his artistic philosophy as follows:  "To me, the most seductive thing about art is its vagueness, or perhaps one may call it its state of neutrality: through this, I gain greater intimacy with the shadows in my soul, which, like a sphere of bloody flesh, weighs heavily on me, exuding its own scent." While the artist's stylistic vocabulary has moved forward, his artistic philosophy has remained essentially unchanged. Taken together, the seven lots offered here demonstrate the compelling phases and varied faces of Zhang Xiaogang's encounter with the "shadows in his soul."

-Philip Tinari