Zhang Xiaogang

Executed in 1996, only two years after his debut at the Sao Paolo Biennial which first brought him international recoginition, Big Family is among the best paintings from Zhang Xiaogang’s most highly acclaimed body of work: the Bloodlines Series. Begun in 1994, a period characterized by a deep cultural identity crisis in China following the bloody events of Tiananmen Square in 1989, this pertinent series has come to embody the revolutionary spirit of Chinese avant-garde art.

The atmosphere of Big Family encapsulates the mood at a critical juncture in twentieth-century Chinese history, conjuring allusions to received impressions of China under Mao. Eloquently Chinese in their sensibilities, Zhang’s figures acquire pathos through their standardised haircuts, accessories and uniforms that firmly locate them within the Mao era. With its nebulous background, rigid poses and soft colouration, the format of Big Family derives from the occasionally hand-tinted black and white photographs in which the proletariat conventionally sought to commit their dreams and aspirations to immortality in front of the lens. Exquisitely painted, Zhang’s soft style is a synthesis of Richter-esque paint handling (he studied the latter’s work on a visit to Germany in 1992) and the traditional approach derived from ancient Chinese chalk drawings. On closer inspection, we see thinly painted red veins tying the family together concretely and physically; most immediately, however, we are struck by the pathos of the ruefully haunting liquid eyes that stare directly out at us.

On the one hand Big Family is a comment on the indefatigable importance of the family in China, in which, rather like the Royal Houses of Europe, the unbroken branches of family trees which date back through dynasties are sacrosanct. The Cultural Revolution sought to dismantle this traditional order and hierarchy that had been in place since Confucious in 500BC and with the rise of Communism the family metaphor was increasingly applied to the nation. In this sense, Zhang’s generic, anonymous family could be read as a metaphor for the whole nation, and the present work a sardonic comment on Mao’s ‘One Child Policy’ which threatened future heritage. In Big Family, the slightly elevated position of the child and her misalignment vis-à-vis her parents, accentuated by her yellow fleshtones, serves to illustrate the inherent dangers of dismantling family hierarchies.

However, Zhang’s work is much more personal than a simple political gloss infers and Big Family is steeped in the family experiences of his own life. Each figure is depicted with a shimmering pink patch, rather like a reflection of light, however instinctively we feel that they are also troubling. The red bloodlines, on the one hand the tangible expression of the branches of the family tree, are the carriers of heritage but also – and more importantly – heredity. While on one level Big Family is a metaphor for the destructive aspects of China’s era of revolutionary struggle, it is also Zhang’s potent personal metaphor for human biology and the power of individual genes to transmit disease from one generation to the next. This is particularly pertinent to Zhang’s personal vision. Firstly, in the mid 1980s, he came close to death from alcoholism; secondly, and more importantly, his mother suffered from schizophrenia. Her illness took its toll on her family and Zhang, as the youngest of four boys, suffered most from the prejudice that mental illness fomented. In a society where ignorance breeds superstition and any deviation from the norm – be it alcoholism or mental illness – is attributed to the wrath of the heavens, ostracization from society is the inevitable result of the stigma of congenital defect.

In the present work, despite the generic, androgynous faces, the genetic defect is evident in the slightly crossed eyes of the young girl (Zhang’s brother suffered the same genetic quirk). For Zhang, who has a young daughter himself, there is a tangible fear of the incipience of his mother’s illness and the guilt attached to the thought of passing on the defect. This fear is an ominous subtext to the painting, in which the potential for transmission besmirches the patches of light that touch the figures’ faces, made all the more tragic by the innocence of the eyes.

In the first instance the expression of one individual’s experience, the enduring appeal of Zhang’s body of work is that it dovetails with the broader psychological trauma of an entire generation. Like Honorée de Balzac’s Comédie Humaine in the Nineteenth century, when seen in totality Zhang’s vast artistic project of the Bloodlines series paints a vivid picture of familial and societal relations at a pivotal moment in modern history.