Zhang Xiaogang

signed in Chinese and dated 2006, framed

This work is generally in good condition. There is a minor scuff on the lower left quadrant. There are occasional scatters of colour spots on the surface. Please note that it was not examined under ultraviolet light.
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Zhang Xiaogang 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 Bloodlines and other series, not only represented Chinese
people to the outside world, but also to China itself, in ways that recontextualise 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 deemphasized 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, reflect 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.