Zhang Xiaogang

signed in Chinese and dated 2006

Max Protetch Gallery, New York
Private Collection, USA

Oriental Art Master No. 123, Today Art Museum, Beijing, China, December, 2006, p.147
Claudia Albertini, Avatars and Antiheroes: A Guide to Contemporary Chinese Artists, Kodansha International, Tokyo, Japan, 2008, p. 165
Zhang Xiaogang, Sara Hildén Art Museum, Tampere, Finland, 2008, p. 165

This work is generally in good condition. There are wear and handling marks around the corners. Two lines of light dripping marks are visible on the lower half of the painting, and are likely to be inherent to the artist's original creation. Please note that it was not examined under ultraviolet light.
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History of the Individual
Zhang Xiaogang’s Works in 2000’s

Memory is the most important means by which human civilisation sustains itself and an important component in human experience, directly influencing our thoughts and actions and shaping our very sense of self in the present. The contemporary Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang has always addressed personal memory as a central theme, expanding from it to connect to the collective memory of an entire generation of Chinese. “What I do is to represent the individual within history. What I want to look at is the state of the individual within history as well as the relationship between the individual and the collective.” Although restructuring the history of the Chinese people is not Zhang’s explicit intention, this is precisely what he achieves through the personal historical narration of his art. Zhang does not critique history, but rather reflects the living conditions of the individual against the great backdrop of history. With this non-critical attitude, Zhang leaves a psychological portrait for contemporary Chinese to discover and contemplate. In the 1990’s, Zhang discovered, in yellowed family portrait photographs, a standpoint from which to narrative personal history, and created the Bloodline: Big Family series. In 2002, he left behind the grand historical background and started to focus instead on the individual psyche in the Amnesia and Memory series, beginning his post-Bloodline period. Since then, he has also created the In-out and Green Wall series. In its Contemporary Asian Art autumn auction, Sotheby’s is proud to present three outstanding works from Zhang Xiaogang’s late period: In-out Series No. 5 from 2006; Sleeping Boy on the Crate, a sculpture exhibited in the 2008 solo show “Zhang Xiaogang: Revision” at the Pace Gallery in New York; and Green Wall-Baby Room from 2009.

As one of the most prominent Chinese contemporary artists, Zhang Xiaogang allows us to examine how a generation of Chinese artists discovered their own voices and matured creatively over time. In the 80’s, Zhang was deeply influenced by existentialism and Eastern philosophy. Just as the Czech author Kafka, whom Zhang admires, searched ceaselessly for the individual’s position, Zhang was intellectually preoccupied with individual life and with writing its “history” from the start. In an essay entitled “In Search of that So-Called ‘Existence’” published in 1988, he pointed out, “the greatness of ‘existence’ also includes our ability to discover and express, proving that each of us is a whole universe and showing us that every individual life is a complete history.”¹ Evidently, history and memory have constituted an important part of the artist’s thinking from a very early stage.

In the 1980’s, Zhang Xiaogang and other artists formed the “Southwest Art Research Group”. For their sentimentalist expression of their thoughts on life and existence, the critic Gao Minglu labeled them “Stream of Life.” “Stream of Life” and “Rational Painting,” the latter represented mostly by northern artists, were the two major forces of the ‘85 New Wave. A concern for life has always been the spiritual foundation of Zhang Xiaogang’s works. The Handwritten Notes series was crucial in the early period. Deeply influenced by Surrealism and Expressionism in style, Zhang’s early paintings often featured religious iconography and were infused with mythology. Under the influence of Eastern philosophy and especially Zhuangzi, he attempted to locate a state of transcendence in his paintings and manifested an extreme individualism. The political turmoil of 1989 startled Zhang into realising the individual’s insignificance in the face of the times. “The individual is insignificant and helpless in the face of the great evil that is fate. We only live in yet another giant vicious cycle”². The political events of 1989 did not only allow Zhang to reexamine the fundamental nature of life, but also made him conscious of the profound impact that ethnic history and social background have on life. A visit to Germany in 1992 affirmed Zhang’s self-positioning as a Chinese artist. Afterwards, using family portrait and photographs of the past as an inspiration, he created a series of portraits as well as the Bloodline: Big Family series, which would achieve great renown. The Red Guards and other figures in Mao-suits in these paintings connect them to a particular historical context; the faded backgrounds and semi-abstract depictions of the human figures create an alienating distance. The single individual is thrust into the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution, embodying the fear and unease brought on by memory and history. “An artist chooses to dwell in a particular moment, committing to his private memory the realities and history that he sees. This dwelling is the opposite of the ephemeral and is a private narration of social memory.”³ The 90’s witnessed Chinese contemporary art’s rise to prominence at international biennials. The Bloodline: Big Family series exhibited in the Sao Paulo Biennial of 1994 and the Venice Biennale of the following year, opening a dialogue with international contemporary art and attracting the attention of collectors worldwide.

In the new millennium, Zhang Xiaogang started to reflect on his creative direction. The Amnesia and Memory series, began in 2002, marked his move away from grand history, from what was seen as an expression of the Chinese past and consciousness, to the bare individual, from “the fate of the individual in a collective” to “a more microscopic psychological reality”. This new series featured portraits of single persons and focused on faces, concealing all background. Later, the series incorporated symbols of Zhang’s early Handwritten Notes series, such as light bulbs, electric torches, notebooks, beds, and television sets. Through the objects he once owned, Zhang sought to recover past memories. The objects thus became the concrete manifestations of memory, important proof for history and its authenticity. Zhang’s works of this period were characterised by a stronger surrealistic tendency and a sense of dreamy ambiguity, reflecting the uncertainty of memory. “Images of past life gradually have become distant in the present reality in which I live, but at the same time are more pressing in my dreams. I thus am often unable to tell clearly whether they truly belong to the past or are a drama being staged in the present.”⁴

In 2004, Zhang achieved a major breakthrough in his inquiry into memory. For the first time he used photography as a creative medium, following his memory and feelings to take a series of snapshots of scenes of everyday life. Moreover, on each photograph he wrote a diary-like record, sometimes recalling the literature and Western philosophy he had read as a young man but more often expressing his intimate thoughts and emotions. These writings are like the inscriptions found on classical Chinese paintings. In the 2009 painting Green Wall-Baby Room (Lot 837), an extension of the photograph series, Zhang applied oil pigments on stainless steel. This work contains the most important symbols of his career, such as a tungsten light bulb, a television set with manual switches, a sofa with lace cover, a bed, and a red infant. Furthermore, the green wall, common in 60’s and 70’s China, evokes a generation’s collective memory of the Cultural Revolution. The red infant is trapped in a fenced bed, and above its head is a disconnected light bulb. There is nobody on the sofa in the back, but a few Latin letters are visible on the television screen on the right. The bandoned infant and the severed wire are metaphors for China’s history and collective memory of the recent decades. In this scene of loneliness and melancholy, Zhang attempts to provide a link between us contemporaries and history. He has expressed his worry about the manipulation of memory, “memory has been revised... I have found that so called ‘memory’ has in fact all been artificially modified.”⁵

In 2004, after Amnesia and Memory, Zhang Xiaogang began the In-out series, moving from memory-filled objects to remembered landscapes. Filtered by memory, these landscapes embody the intersection of history and fiction. In-out Series No. 5 (Lot 901) from 2006 is among the most important works in the series. Here Zhang takes as his subject Houhai. In the distance are the buildings of the Forbidden City, and at the bottom small sculls floating on a lake. As in Amnesia and Memory, the blurry image of In-out Series No. 5 represents a past time. The only clearly-defined objects are a pair of large speakers in the foreground. Recalling photographic focus, such an effect serves as Zhang’s reminder that memory is modified and interpreted. “People are only willing to remember what they like, what they want to remember.”⁶ The large speakers in Inout Series No. 5 are an important embodiment of the artist’s memory, and doubtlessly represent an entire era of the past. As Zhang has admitted, “I lived as a ‘rusticated youth’ in the countryside for two years. Whenever I recall the countryside, loudspeakers pop into my mind.”⁷

Created in 2008, the sculpture Sleeping Boy on the Crate (Lot 836) significantly marked Zhang Xiaogang’s venture beyond painting, and was exhibited in the same year at the solo show “Zhang Xiaogang: Revision” at Pace Gallery in New York. Infants had appeared in Zhang’s earliest works as symbols of the Chinese people, but this sleeping boy represented a search for memory. As he put it, “nowadays, sleep has become a very special thing in life. It often becomes an intersection between past and present, or an invisible current that mixes together many things from past and present, carrying them back and forth. For example, are our cultural traditions asleep? Or are they dead? Sleep is sometimes very close to death. It can lead us to a spiritual realm, but it can also cause forgetting or death.” ⁸

Past memories can simultaneously evoke familiar, confused, and even alien feelings. The uncertainty of memory is an issue that humans must face. Through the narration of personal history, Zhang Xiaogang explores the ever-vanishing and self-corrected memory of the Chinese people. He hopes to grasp and save what is salient and valuable in images of past life, articulating individual histories within the grand current of time.

1 Zhang Xiaogang, Looking for Existence, 1998
2 Zhang Xiaogang, 1989-1991:Returning to the Human World
3 Leng Lin, Foreword of exhibition “16:9”, 2010
4 Zhang Xiaogang, Artist Statement, 2003
5 Artist Interview with “World Art”
6 Refer to 5
7 Refer to 5
8 Refer to 5