Tang Zhigang

Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong
Acquired by the present owner from the above

This painting should be hung as is. It is stable and stretched on its original stretcher. The paint layer is clean and unvarnished. There is a slightly grainy texture to the paint on the extreme upper left edge that appears to be original. We recommend that the picture be hung as is. It was not examined under UV light.
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Tang Zhigang's little soldiers and child politicians have an engaging humor to them despite, or perhaps because of the fact that he grew up in an army family and pursued a career in the army immediately after graduating from high school. 

In Tang's engaging pictorial world, children affect the manners and disposition of powerful adults, gleefully conducting unspecified affairs of the state. In Tang's whimsical descriptions of official gatherings in the Children in Meeting series, children often sit at long tables covered with red tablecloths, upon which cups of tea rest; they raise their hands in unison, a gesture that at once signals political unity and the eagerness of young students to answer the teacher's question.  His scenarios reveal more than a passing familiarity with both the wiles of children and the seriousness of adult activities.  And in his absurd superimposition of the two, one has the feeling Tang finds the state mechanisms of today's China a bit ridiculous, communicating a gap between reality and the sharply honed niceties of public presentation.

Queried about the meaning of his work, the Children in Meeting series in particular, Tang replies with a deadpan answer: "These children are the successors of socialism." Quite literally representing the inheritors of a socialist country now given over to the pursuit of pleasure, Tang's diminutive bureaucrats are ill-equipped to make real contributions to civil society, a notion that itself now seems dated to the point of meaninglessness.  Interestingly, Tang painted an earlier series entitled Adults in Meeting, which is wholly comprehensible as a sequence of bureaucratic tableaux - and which makes his series with children all the more legible as social critique.

Although the patent strangeness of Tang's imagery has multiple bases in real life - Tang has recently worked with teaching children the rudiments of painting - the silliness of the artist's proposals carries with them more than a touch of satire.  In Children in Meeting (2000, Lot 2), five boys dressed in military suits stand before us, their demeanor unquestionably childlike despite their professional uniforms; the child at center gestures toward his audience, his mouth open in front of a microphone, as if haranguing his listeners.  The other children clap in appreciation of the speaker's words.  The children stand in front of a khaki curtain with a long, horizontal stripe near the top; beneath them is a red carpet.  Everything is perfectly official except the age of the participants and the children's toys - model cars, a children's book, a white ball - that are strewn about.

The situation is irrational and the points made aren't subtle: we children will inherit your adult roles, or perhaps, rather, the adults who toy in politics are a bunch of role-playing children.  One boy even looks like he is balding, adding a hint of uncanniness to the farcical proceedings.  Tang takes care to paint each child with different expressions; their individuality persists despite the leveling effect of the uniforms, lending them a surreal aura of veracity.  Tang's claim on our imagination comes by way of an undeniable humor and charm, but the critique put forth in this body of work should be deeply troubling.

For, in fact, the difference between children and adults is really not as great as it seems.  Whether in groups or individually, Tang's little characters play on a stage representing the real world.  How poignant and laden with meaning is Untitled (2005, Lot 3), in which a tiny, naked child, an infant really, sits alone at the edge of a diving board above a body of water with a few whitish waves and swimming fish.  The naked babe stares down between his feet at the water below, and in the far distance at lower left a hill or mountain sketches in the natural setting.  Because we see him only in profile, we cannot speculate on his emotions, but the image evokes the solitude and insecurity that is - alongside boring meetings and incompetent politicians - the lot of humanity. 

-Jonathan Goodman