Meeting in Painting: Tang Zhigang

Monica Dematte

When I first met Tang Zhigang, in 1997, I had to hide, well disguised with scarf and hat, in a friend's car in order to sneak into the People's Liberation Army school where his studio was. Foreigners are not allowed to enter PLA settlements without a special permit. There he showed me his present and past works, dating back over ten years, with an excitement mixed with a great sense of humour. At that time I was one of the first foreign 'art critics' to visit the local artists in Kunming. Besides his oil paintings, there were many works on paper, both drawings and small acrylics. I remember being really impressed by the series of tiny oils he had made on military life, in the years from 1988 to 1994, for their straightforwardness and honest simplicity.

Tang comes from an army family, and was a soldier his whole adult life, up until his recent resignation. To be in the army is a very common condition in China, and, with the exception of wartime, it tends to be a rather privileged social position. PL A men and women are mainly able to lead a very normal life, although they need to repay their comparatively comfortable daily routine with the obligation to wear the uniform, at least sometimes, and to attend an endless number of meetings. The complex Chinese communist social structure, based on group activities, political education,
bureaucratic rules, establishment of standards and propaganda patterns, is most evident within the PLA, one of its most
orthodox organizations. PLA members are supposed to serve as models, and to give direction to the masses.

Having been entitled to such privileges and burdens for almost 30 years, no wonder Tang is obsessed with a certain stale regime's iconography, such as the 'meeting' and the 'group photo'.

Generational icons
His active role in the army, as a soldier on the field, started and ended for Tang with the war against Vietnam, in which he took part, even receiving a reward for 'distinguished service'. While at the front, at Mt. Balihe, he was given the duty to produce sketches of the soldiers living in the trenches. There is no reference to their dramatic situation, though; rather, Tang shows them in their daily routine: reading papers, delousing themselves and so on.

Tang's works of the late eighties mostly have been devoted to themes related to a peaceful life in the army camp: playing chess, slaughtering pigs, fetching water...every aspect of a soldier's everyday occupations has been reproduced in a plain, realistic style. Nothing of the 'socialist realism' ideologically encouraged by the government for decades, so pompous and deeply anti-realistic with its heroes and 'models', is left in Tang's paintings, and their poetic value lies in their very unpretentiousness. Excerpts from his diary, which narrate moments in time from his childhood onwards, have the same intimate and un-heroic tone: Tang seems to have been more impressed by the open air toilet on Mt. Lao than by any real war activity. And when he talks about his life as a child in the Kunyang labour farm, where his mother was a prison warden, he often indulges in describing details related to sex or even practices of personal hygiene.

The life of every Chinese of Tang's age has been documented through the same occasions and modes, as his fellow painter Zhang Xiaogang, who is also of Yunnanese origin, has pointed out in his paintings inspired by Cultural Revolution period family photos. These key moments began with the baby's 100th day of life celebration, followed by a few family photos (at least one for every new child) and then by a good number of group photos from school days to the work unit. Unlike today, most of these images were taken in a photographic studio, with background of either painted scenarios or a plain curtain. I am looking at a picture shot in 1974, when Tang was fifteen, taken with thirty-six middle school classmates. Boys are on the right side, girls on the left. The cloth used as a backdrop has been fixed on the wall, on top of others with different patterns, ready to be unveiled on other occasions. This curtain is meant either to enrich or to simplify the photographic effect, depending on one's purpose, and it has become one of the leitmotifs in the majority of Tang's recent paintings. It is the metaphor of a parallel life made of crystallised moments when everything, from the face's and body's expression, to the environment, ceases to be natural, spontaneous; and instead becomes a facade.

For someone like Tang, who is touched by the most prosaic and genuine aspects of life, the switch from portraying these aspects to engaging in the systematic
reproduction of the most 'artificial' moments of one's life, must have been the result of a deliberate choice. The cloth backdrop appears even in early works, like 'Ah' (1992), still based on the soldier's life, and then in the humorous 'Horse' (1998) (otherwise entitled 'Five-legged'), where the un-demure animal is waiting in front of a white bed sheet to have its picture taken. In 1984, Tang posed for a group photo of the '35011 Propaganda Division', with an expression of strong discontentment, if not disgust. He and his eleven fellows are again portrayed in front of a curtain.

As time goes by, and the means for photography become more widely accessible, pictures start to have a more spontaneous look, and the arranged stage is used on fewer occasions. Nevertheless, these memories are lodged in Tang's mind, and continue as essential elements in the composition of his paintings.

Meeting - kai hui!
There is another common setting where the curtain is used, both as a partition and as a background, normally carrying the date and title of the venue, and that is the meeting. The word kai hui, used and abused in the Chinese language after Liberation, refers to an activity which has been used mainly for political propaganda, and, being held far too often, in many occasions has ended up being a true waste of time. Kai hui is also a good excuse when one wants to stress one's being extremely busy, not with personal business, but with public matters. To kai hui implies incapability to answer the phone, receive visits, attend events and so on. Recently I have heard people in public toilets, busy freeing their bladders, pretending on their mobile phones that they were kai hui.

Chinese are particularly skilled when it comes to arranging such activities as conferences and meetings: everything is prepared in advance and every aspect is taken into consideration, from disposition of the participants according to hierarchy, to what drinks to serve. The most official meetings, with tables covered with red cloth, banners hung on the walls (which in Tang's works intentionally carry no slogans, so as to stress how pointless were the endless ideological campaigns) and neat porcelain cups filled with hot tea, have become in the artist's iconography the symbol of an era: an era of orthodoxy and propaganda, when political power meant everything.

The unique small painting 'Meeting in a Wooden Basin' (1998, oil on paper, 65 cm x 65 cm) is the most explicit in this respect. In it, the artist places the usual meeting setting in a half-covered wooden basin, evoking the proverbial frog in the well, who can only see a small portion of the sky and
believes it to be the whole. From 1997-98 many paintings are devoted to the theme 'adults in meetings' and all of them share the same pictorial elements. Here the speakers are rigidly still, either with their hands underneath the table, applauding unanimously or raised in approval. Often the meetings are held in the open air (probably a characteristic of the army), and dark blue skies appear beyond the curtains. The participants, all men, are well characterised, with features carefully painted, although in an unhealthy yellowish tone. They are dressed in the most classic garments still used in the eighties: besides the various range of military uniforms, some wear Mao suits, in hues from light blue to grey.

The atmosphere in these works is static and surreal, the perspective unorthodox and flattened. The canvas is divided into large areas of colour, and the light is strong and artificial. The artist chooses an 'awkward', simplified composition, to enhance the sense of fixity, and the laughable seriousness of these activities. The speakers, all playing their role, take the official task to its extreme extent, as if they were debating the future of humanity. Deeply absorbed in the game they are playing, they are extremely careful neither to lose face nor to make others lose it. Tang must have had the chance to observe and memorize
carefully as a detached observer every expression, and here he is pitilessly reporting his experience, reduced to the most basic elements.
The child in us
One of the many times I visited Tang's studio, which was often relocated and eventually moved out of the PLA compound to more convenient and spacious premises, I found him giving a painting lesson to several children. This is an activity he has been carrying on for many years, having been appointed to do so by the captain when in the army, and still performs up to now. I have the feeling that it has become, for him, another 'observation pedestal' of human social behaviour. Both the adults' group activities, such as military life and meetings, and the children's art classes, are actually situations where human
relationships are subject to authority and are governed by strict regulations.

Waiting for the class to end, I noticed that Tang had separated the little girls and boys into two separate rows, and that he kept a rather rigid discipline. His authoritative - if not authoritarian, at times - approach was useful to me, when giving lectures at the Academy where Tang teaches; I had already learned that he could be very effective in this respect.

As Tang has written, one of the reasons for switching his attention from adults to children has been the similarity in their behaviour: while the adults were sitting in meetings, the children would attend the art classes and 'raise their hands to answer [his] questions'. They have both been scrutinised and coldly analysed by Tang's sceptical eye. I believe that the painter has found in the children many of the shortcomings which grow more evident when one becomes adult, while some infantile anti-social traits seem to have been disguised in the grownups behind a diplomatic curtain of politeness. The typology he is repeatedly investigating is related to a certain period of Chinese politics, and the children are for him the 'successors of socialism'. It is also true that, switching from adults to children, he is somehow playing it safer: humour is greatly accepted and practiced in China, but some subjects are still taboo.

It was in 1999 that Tang started to produce paintings where the adults in meetings are replaced by small children. The effect is amusing and, at first, disorienting; then the message becomes quite explicit. Besides replacing the adults' faces with those of infants, the painter has added scattered toys - mainly cars and balls - to enhance the paradox. The familiar icons are still there: tables covered with cloth, banner, microphones, curtains. On the floor simple rectangular carpets have become important pictorial elements, while dogs, both real and toy, start to appear in nearly every canvas.

Here the artist, as he admits, is creating paintings that are `strategic', that follow a `pre-meditated plan', where every single element is chosen for its symbolic value. Subverting the principles of Chinese and Soviet Socialist Realism, which Tang absorbed during his artistic education in Nanjing and Beijing, he is now forging a breed of anti-hero baby cadres that satirises a whole era.

In this new series, which is still on-going, Tang starts to explore some purely pictorial elements: now that the subject has been chosen, and the symbolism has been codified, he is free to concentrate on formal aspects. The environment is no longer realistic: the figures are immersed in non-defined spaces, evenly painted, and the only differences are the disposition and number of the basic elements.

Tang is experimenting with many possi-bilities, in a nearly mannerist way. One recent motif is the enlargement of one to three children's heads, magically suspended on the wall behind the speakers, as a reminder of past idols. The hue of the enormous heads has a purely pictorial value, varying
from bluish to pinkish. In some cases the head of the same child is repeated, in others the little boys are immortalized in very unofficial postures, fingers in nostrils...Here a few children sit behind the table, raising their hands, there they seem to listen to another, who is standing on a chair, animatedly performing his speech. Some incongruous infantile gesture appears at times: a child is crying, his pants down, while another harangues the imaginaryisteners; yet another sucks his fingers, looking displaced.

The garments worn by the children are nearly the same Mao suits worn by their predecessors, although in some cases Tang creates new uniforms for them: white shirts with the historical red handkerchief around the neck, shorts and improbable white socks in sumptuous, well polished leather shoes. At times Tang now takes direct inspiration from the photographic repertoire of the former party leaders: the two children in arm chairs, with a spittoon on the floor and the cups on the small table, are the re-interpretation of an icon far too familiar to every Chinese.

The toys scattered on the floor seem to have a double meaning: on the one hand, they stress the displacement and distortion created by the painter, while on the other they suggest that adults are actually behaving as if they were playing, even when they are dealing with very serious matters.

In these suspended environments, with no spatial connotations, carpets and curtains, tables and chairs are symbolically so transparent that they are significant for their very formal look. Proportions are freely distorted; faces are repeated so as to suggest that individuality has been lost.

Moreover, Tang changes the painting technique according to the subject and to the picture's needs. Sometimes the brushstrokes are quick and very visible, resembling those of his early portraits in a so-called realist style (1979-80), although the colours are different; elsewhere he prefers a very smooth treatment, rather similar to the contemporary 'Sichuanese' trend.

Beginning in 2003, Tang added a new pictorial device: he drips paint and drags the brush on the surface, leaving casual traces here and there. This might be a way to enrich the visual effect (Tang intentionally limits the range of objects and colours in each picture) and also a hint at self-mockery: the painter, although an adult, is nothing but a grown-up kid, and his infantile impulses are showing up in his most serious/playful activity: painting indeed.

Trento, Italy February 2004