Zhang Xiaogang

Galerie de France, Paris
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Paris, Galerie de France, Zhang Xiaogang, Les Camarades, 1999
Amiens, Museé de Picardie, Passe-murailles, Nouvelles scènes de l'art contemporain chinois, 2001, p. 52, illustrated in colour and on the exhibition poster
Paris, Galerie de France, Zhang Xiaogang, Mémoire et oubli, 2003, p. 69, illustrated in colour

Hanart TZ Gallery and Galerie Enrico Navarra, Eds., Umbilical Cord of History: Paintings by Zhang Xiaogang, Paris 2004, p. 165, illustration of the 2001 exhibition poster in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the pink is brighter and more vibrant in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent under ultra-violet light.
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Executed in 1996, the year after Zhang Xiaogang's internationally acclaimed participation in the Venice Biennale, Comrades is an outstanding example of the artist's Bloodlines series which exhibits his recently honed mature style. The 1990s was a decade characterized by a deep cultural identity crisis in China, as the nation struggled to rationalise the bloody events of Tiananmen Square that had signalled the close of the previous decade with the meteoric economic advances and market reforms that defined the present. Comrades is very much a product of that specific socio-political climate, fomented of a societal need to acknowledge the past, deal with its ramifications and embrace the future.  

 

The title, Comrades, resonates with a very specific, potent meaning. Used as a term of address, through Zhang Xiaogang's formative years, the word Comrade was introduced as a unifying, egalitarian concept across Chinese society, its original meaning hijacked after the People's Republic of China was formed so that it became imbued with strong socialist connotations. Citizens who were formerly neighbours, friends or business partners became united under a pseudo-militaristic, revolutionary banner of Comradeship. During the Cultural Revolution, those whose familial circumstances elevated them above the proletariat, were forcibly required to become 'comrades' through the levelling processes of self-criticism and re-education in labour camps in the provinces. Considered by birth to be a member of the maligned 'liberal bourgeoisie', Zhang Xiaogang, as an adolescent, was forced to toil in the fields of Yunnan to learn the virtues of agrarian labour and immerse himself in the virtues of the peasant classes. It is a chapter in his personal history that scars his memory, manifested in the present work in the pink patches that appear like mental scar tissue on the sitters' chin and temple.

 

There was only one image of a true comrade - embodied by Comrade Mao Zedong - and that dictated everything, from the haircut to the garments that could be worn to the expression that a happy commune worker or peasant was required to don. This was the image of the ideal comrade, the happy, healthy smiling face of the working class, that was promulgated by the deeply mendacious posters and billboards produced by the State propaganda department. Here was the surface unity that all Chinese people were obliged to aspire to at the expense of individuality and freedom of expression. As Karen Smith says, "The multiple Comrades series could easily be read as the tongue-in-cheek parody of the dream each sitter harboured for an unblemished immortality as they presented themselves to the camera lens, creating an ideal picture of health that propaganda invested in the Mao era" (Karen Smith, Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant-Garde Art in New China, Zürich 2005, p. 289). However, in Zhang Xiaogang's biting satire, the smiling faces are replaced by solemnity, illegible expressions which hint at the wounds that fester beneath the fictional veneer of contentment. There is great dignity, pathos and stoicism in these faces which endure in silence for fear of the inevitable repercussions of revolt.

 

It is this tension between the individual and the collective that Zhang Xiaogang so cleverly and sardonically explores in Comrades. The muted and compliant individuals, with their glassy, inexpressive gazes, appear nameless and timeless, a series of individual histories represented in a formulaic and homogenous fashion. The chilly smoothness of Zhang Xiaogang's painterly technique works to conceal not only his protagonists' physical idiosyncrasies, but also their inner emotional turmoil, depicting figures whose inner desires and innate individuality appears crushed beneath the dull acceptance of a collective reality. Here the female figure, physiognomically not dissimilar from her male counterpart, is depicted wearing the ubiquitous, standardised uniform of the worker-peasant. Fashioned in military green, this utilitarian attire forcibly co-opted citizens into pseudo-military dress in the name of progress and revolution. Neither masculine nor feminine, it was the same for everyone, regardless of age or station. By contrast, her bespectacled male comrade is dressed in a white collared shirt, dangerously close the attire of students or intellectuals, those who were the most severely persecuted under the strictures of the Cultural Revolution. Their uniformity is all the more explicit in Zhang Xiagang's portraiture, in which their faces become androgynous and all signs of difference are erased by his brush.

 

In questioning the very idea of a fully-formed self-identity within a strongly rooted Chinese collectivism, on a familial and national level, Zhang Xiaogang recapitulates the collective experience of violated privacy, creating convincing images of the suppressed psyche of China's recent past. Zhang Xiaogang feels a particular empathy for his mother who, as a young woman during the Cultural Revolution, was part of the precise generation that suffered most, robbed of hopes and aspirations of future happiness. Forced to abandon her personal needs and dreams to the Cultural Revolution, Zhang Xiaogang comments of his mother that "society changed her into a different person" (the artist cited in: M. Nuridsany, China Art Now, Paris 2004, p. 12). In Zhang Xiaogang's generic family tree, his mother stands as the cipher for everyman, for the shattered dreams of an entire generation. Probing the internalised psychological trauma of the Cultural Revolution, the Bloodlines series is a powerful exploration of the historical clash between family and nationhood, group and self-identity. Nowhere is this more eloquently displayed than in Comrades, a painting of great pathos and dignity which commands an exalted place in the pantheon of Zhang Xiaogang's Bloodlines series.