Zhang Xiaogang

Zhang Xiaogang
Edward Lucie-smith

Chang Tsong-zung, in a catalogue note for Zhang's work, once remarked that "[the artist] is fascinated by the tensions between the forces of public life and individual privacy…In recapitulating the collective experience of violated privacy, Zhang has created convincing images of the suppressed psyche of China's recent past."

These formulations open door into aspects of contemporary Chinese western-style painting that has been comparatively little discussed. If one looks at the paintings produced by artists of the same generation [Zhang was born in 1958], or slightly younger, one sees three different modes at work. One is so-called 'Political Pop', a mode derived from western Pop Art, but also incorporating elements borrowed from the official art produced during the Cultural Revolution [1966-1976]. Another has sometimes been labelled 'Ugly Realism', and combines realistic depiction with elements of the grotesque. In western terms, it has links with German Expressionism, and with the Neue Sachlichkeit art that flourished in Germany at the time of the Weimar Republic. A third style, rarer than the other two, is a kind of stringent Davidian classicism, typified by the work of the Liaoning artist Wang Xingwei [b. 1969]. This too contains a large number of elements that refer to the art of the Cultural Revolution period.

Zhang Xiaogang does not fit comfortably into any of these categories. His art is, however, very recognisably the product of a contemporary Chinese sensibility. Essentially, his present work only began in the early 1990s, after a dramatic break with the past and a period of travel and reflection. His source of inspiration was old photographs, and in particular rediscovered photographs of his mother as a young and attractive woman.

Anyone who has been in contact with contemporary Chinese culture will have noticed the attraction that portrait photographs, generally stiffly posed and very formal, have for the inhabitants of China. Photographs record all important rites of passage - the individual as a baby, the individual with parents, with siblings, with members of his or her extended family, with fellow-pupils, co-workers, with participants in some collective event. These formally posed photographs have also attracted the attention of other Chinese artists, notably the conceptualist Hai Bo [b. 1962], who pairs group photographs taken during the Cultural Revolution period with others, showing the subjects identically posed, but as they are today.

These works by Hai Bo are affecting because of the way in which they reflect the passage of time. In one pair of group photographs, for example, the second photograph shows only one surviving participant out of five - all the others are dead. The survivor is wearing a western-style leather jacket, and has gown a trendy moustache.

When one compares Hai Bo's work with that of Zhang Xiaogang some of the fundamental differences between the things that photography can go and the things that painting can do immediately become apparent. As Hai's work states clearly, a photograph is a slice cut through an ongoing stream of events. It halts the passage of time at a particular moment. Hai's conjunctions enable us to compare one absolutely specific moment with another, equally specific.

This is not something that painting can do. Zhang notes the fact that old photographs "are a particular visual language" and says: "I am seeking to create an effect of 'false photographs' - to re-embellish already 'embellished' histories and lives." He is, nevertheless keenly aware of the differences between the two media - differences that become especially crucial when we consider their relationship to the idea of time. A painting, made using western techniques, is usually something that has to be slowly built up. This is even more apt to be true if it is figurative. The smooth surfaces typical of Zhang's paintings are not the product of spontaneous impulses. His paintings are something distilled, not only from his study of old photographs, but from his sense of the contemporary Chinese situation. They offer a subtle analysis of what is happening in Chinese society.

When one looks at the paintings, one gets a poignant sense, as the artist himself says, of things that are being with some difficulty concealed: "On the surface the faces in these portraits appear as calm as still water, but underneath there is great emotional turbulence. Within this state of conflict the propagation of obscure and ambiguous destinies is carried on from generation to generation."

In order to understand the precise effect, one must look at the paintings in detail. For the most part the personages shown, children as well as adults, are rigidly posed, staring directly at the camera. This replicates the naïve photographic conventions prevalent in China from the 1920s onwards. In a very literal sense, those portrayed are putting their "best faces" forward - the version of themselves that they want to outside world to encounter. Where full length figures are shown, which is quite rarely, the heads of the figures are often slightly too large for their bodies. This puts the emphasis on facial features, even when the whole body is shown.

The personages depicted in the paintings sometimes wear Chinese dress, but are also sometimes clad in western-style clothing, often of a slightly outmoded kind. One particularly charming painting, 'Baby Navy' [2001] shows a little boy seated in a high chair, wearing the top part of an old-fashioned western sailor suit. His lower half is naked.

The clothes speak of different things. In many cases the people depicted seem to be young intellectuals, full of high hopes for the future. Zhang's paintings contrive to suggest that these hopes are unlikely to be fulfilled. It is subjects of this type especially the men, who wear a version of Chinese dress. Occasionally there are details that suggest adherence to the ideas and values of the Cultural Revolution. In one group portrait, for instance, two figures wear the red armbands of the Red Guard. In other groups, the figures seem to be equipped with the Little Red Book of Mao's sayings, or are linked by a red thread that meanders over their torsos, The brilliant red hue is the more telling because Zhang's paintings are usually subdued in colour.

Paintings where the people portrayed wear European dress seemed intended to evoke a period before the Cultural Revolution, and indeed before the rise of Communism, when China was being torn apart by warring factions. In particular, they suggest a link to the Shanghai of the 1930s and 1930s, where a portion of the population adopted not only European styles of dress, but European ways of thinking and behaving. What these people have in common with the rest of Zhang's subjects is their closed, composed, deeply solemn expressions. The effect is reinforced by the fact that Zhang imitates the effects of photographic retouching - the kind of retouching that attempts to idealise the appearance of the sitters, to make them more 'beautiful' or more 'handsome' than they really are, but which often imparts a curiously mask-like quality.

In some paintings this is contradicted by small patches of colour where it seems as if a
part of the mask has been ripped away. The smooth integrity of the portrayal is thus violated. These markings can be read in two ways, however - they can also be seen as being an imitation of damage done by time to the photographic original.

Another characteristic of the paintings, when they represent groups of people rather than single individuals, is the way in which one or more of the those portrayed with will be picked out in brilliant, non-naturalistic colour - red or yellow. This is the case, for instance, with 'Comrades with Red Baby' [1994]. These colours are clearly intended to be symbolic - they indicate political and racial affiliations. A literally red baby will grow up to inhabit of politically 'red' world.

How is one to interpret Zhang's work, taken as a whole? The first point to be made is that, though the primary sources are photographic, the paintings also have roots in traditional Chinese ancestor portraits. These ancestor portraits, full of detail but impassive, reflect a very Chinese view about the importance of continuity. Throughout China's turbulent 20th century, this was challenged, not merely by the violence of events, but by the need to absorb new political and social ideas. Zhang's work suggests that deep-rooted traditional concepts of this kind have survived in the places where one might least expect to find them - among the intellectual elite, and among those who have been most completely exposed to western culture and who have assumed many of its outward forms.

Zhang's paintings also suggest something else - the enormous emotional pressures that a newly emergent Chinese middle-class has had to sustain, and which, to some extent at least, it continues to sustain. These are people with an immense turmoil locked up inside them. The turmoil is signalled by small signs. For example, in some of the group paintings one of the subjects, usually a child, will have a squint, where one pupil, rather than staring directly ahead, wanders into a corner of the eye-socket. In a composition where everyone else is staring fixedly at the spectator, this produces a uniquely disturbing effect.

The paintings are about the process of coming to terms with China's recent history. They are also about the conflict between what is public and what is private in present-day China. How far can the individual push claims to uniqueness; how gar can he or she assert a right to independent action? In traditional Chinese society, the individual was rarely, if indeed ever, a completely separate entity. He existed only in relationship to others - first to the family group, then to the whole hierarchy of an elaborately structured society. 'Individualism' - a sense of the self as a complete universe in its own right - was not an option. Nor was it really an option in the kind of communist society envisioned by Mao tze-dong.

Zhang Xiaogang notes that Chinese society is undergoing a process of rapid transformation, and that this has raised a whole series of questions that most Chinese have never previously had to ask themselves. The remarkable series of painting that he has created since the beginning of the 1990s formulate these questions, but do not venture to supply answers. They are ambiguous, in the sense that most successful pictorial art is ambiguous. What his work does is to invite the spectator to think about the situation, to explore it from several points of view. Some of the possible approaches are those that I have tried to set out in this essay.