Zhang Xiaogang

signed in Chinese and Pinyin and dated 1997, framed

Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong
Sotheby's New York, March 21 2007, lot 16
Sotheby’s, Hong Kong, 4 October, 2010, lot 612
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale 

This work is generally in good condition. There are minor wear in handling marks around the edges. Having examined the work under ultraviolet light, there appears to be no evidence of restoration.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
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A New Generation of Chinese
Zhang Xiaogang

 

Bloodline Series: Yellow Baby (Lot 746) was painted in 1997, during the most consequential period of Zhang Xiaogang’s career. It was during this time that he cemented his style and themes for the rest of his career. A continuation of his Bloodline: Big Family series, Yellow Baby is a meditation on the Chinese family. Zhang Xiaogang was profoundly moved by the birth of his daughter Huanhuan, and afterwards began to move the focus of his creative practice from the ambivalences of adult Chinese towards their country and fellow citizens to the emergence and development of a Chinese generation. For him, infants thus became an important theme, representing hope for, doubt about, and even fear of the future. Bloodline: Yellow Baby was created in 1997, the artist’s daughter was only three, and was an important early work on the theme of infants. Alluding ineluctably to Zhang’s own family, it is highly autobiographical and infused with a sense of privacy.

 

Born in 1958 in Kunming and a 1982 graduate from Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, Zhang Xiaogang had gone through several major exploratory periods before finally gaining the iconic status as one of the top contemporary Chinese artists with his breakthrough Bloodline: Big Family series. Zhang has produced a body of work that increasingly seems of critical importance to his generation of Mainland Chinese artists. A resolutely figurative painter, Zhang has, in his Bloodline and other series, not only represented Chinese people to the outside world, but also to China itself, in ways that re-contextualise Chinese features as essentially anonymous. This anonymity refers to an earlier, but hardly forgotten time in Chinese history, when both men and women wore the obligatory Mao suit and cap, which de-emphasised sexual difference in favour of class and gender equality. Zhang’s idiosyncratic even eerie portraits, in which the faces of men and women are virtually the same, speak volumes about the kinds of social pressure within Maoist society at the time. 

For Zhang, art encompasses the pursuit of psychological reality—there is no overt attempt to protest specific conditions, only an unspoken nostalgia that is ambivalent in its affiliations with the society of a past era. The method and gravity with which Zhang’s images are painted reflects his preoccupation with the core of Chinese identity; his portraits are based on old family photographs and charcoal drawings he buys on the street in China. In Zhang’s primarily cool-toned paintings, whose colour is usually limited to a small patch on the cheek, the thin red blood line, or occasionally a flash of colour prescribed by dress code, we see Chinese people from a less affluent period of the past.

Although the artist claims that his truths are personal, his art reaches beyond the psychological to present a way of life – one that he lived, too – which was then highly politicised. By focusing on one person at a time in his work, Zhang successfully describes the effect of Chinese politics on the common people. Despite the anonymity and visual repetition of the artist’s portraits, there is always something – a colour patch on the figure’s face, the thin bloodline – that moves the painting away from selflessness towards an assertion of identity. Individuality is present, no matter how narrow or rigid the society may be. It is important, therefore, to recognise the dignity with which the artist invests the spirit of the anonymous individuals he portrays. Somehow, it seems, these portraits are meant to survive as trace images of identities that refused complete capitulation to self-sacrifice. Yet we are not sure whether Zhang’s portraits exalt anonymity or independence of being. It is a question the works beg, which Zhang deliberately refrains from analyzing or answering.

Although it is possible to overemphasise the social implications of Zhang’s portraits, it is nonetheless clear that he represents a broad swathe of society through the silent presence of those he paints. Their focused but mute regard and their obdurately obscure message have everything to do with the way the Chinese see themselves – not only during the Maoist period, but also today, when Chinese society is deeply interwoven with capitalist practices. As such, it is little surprise that the precise content of Zhang’s enigmas is never fully explained, and the viewer’s experience remains essentially one of enchanted mystery.

In Bloodline Series: Yellow Baby, the yellow Baby seated on a chair by a dining table appears to be a girl, but has a boy’s the haircut and dress. This ambiguity in gender anticipates the deliberate gender neutrality in Zhang Xiaogang’s subsequent works and represents a crucial aspect of his aesthetics. As the artist himself has said, “What I truly want to paint are not concrete, individualised portraits, but rather human beings as types and symbols. Whether they are male or female is not important, nor their ages and actual identities. Every person I paint in the Bloodline: Big Family series is really the same person. This person can be in different costumes, have different haircuts, wear glasses or not, be male or female, but essentially they are the same person.”¹ Bloodline Series: Yellow Baby is thus truly an indispensable masterpiece within Zhang Xiaogang’s Bloodline series of the 1990s.

1 Ed. Lv Peng, Zhang Xiaogang, Sichuan Fine Arts Publishing House, 2007