Beijing

Zhang Xiaogang 张晓刚

Zhang Xiaogang born in 1958 in Kumming, Yunnan province is a leading figure of the artistic trends that characterizes China's western part. Known as the Sichuan school, this type of art is very different from the work produced on the commercially developed east coast. Geographically detached from the political forces of Beijing, the remote west of China was less affected by the destructive consequences of the Cultural Revolution and governmental intervention in everyday life.

they also have some unique characteristics that challenge the utopian idea of an organic collective. The expressionless eyes of the figures in Zhang’s paintings can be seen as a motive that criticizes or mocks the exaggerated tendency that Chinese culture attaches to the importance of the collective. According to Zhang, one can try to unify and collectivize separate components, by making them wear the same cloths and believe in a common idea but the individual features of a human being are far too strong to completely give in and blend in the whole.

Zhang Xiaogang is one of China's most famous painters, His 1993 work Tiananmen Square (see below), sold for a record high of $2.3 million at Christie's auction house in Hong Kong (Nov. 2006) This work is seen as a critic of the tragic events of 1989.

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Zhang Xiaogang on Himself, 1995

Generally speaking, I am used to observing and experiencing the realities of our place and our history with some “distance.” In this space formed of distance, I feel that the imagination of art has come to have its own places of sojourn. To say this is not to say I try to be a cynical globetrotter. Perhaps this is entirely the construction of my own personality and temperament. I often subconsciously want to stand behind reality, to experience that which is hidden below this reality, those things we call “mysterious.” For example, when people are engaged in deep thought, this is to me a most charming moment. Perhaps this means that I cannot become a “cultural” artist attuned to serious social questions, nor a “scientific” formalist. I can never talk of art as an object without connection to life or existence. I believe in intuition over conceptual explanation; I depend on raw lived experience over borrowed insight; I emphasize emotion and admire the light of rationality. These things are always useful in their individual creative states, pushing forth their own centers of interest and aesthetic consciousness. In this way, my artistic sensibility seems always to flow out of a kind of “reading of the inner heart.”

A Chinese artist often feels that he needs to “talk” too much. Too many contradictions and doubts have formed our current complex psyche of that which is “hard to express in words.” For example, the concept of “collectivism” has ingrained itself deeply into our consciousness, forming emotions that are impossible to shake off. These numerous things given to us by history and reality might become an artist’s riches, or they might become a spiritual burden, turning our works into tedious chatter in which words don’t express the meaning, or often “wishing to speak and then stopping,” giving people a certain kind of inexplicable ambiguity. One chance encounter: I read in a book once a few words by British experimental artist Eduardo Paul Klee???, which were very influential for me: “a person can very easily have the right idea, but choose the wrong means to express it. Or he can have the right means, but lack a clear idea.” It sounds strange, this is a very ordinary train of thought, but it made me reconsider the rich resources of my own past.

Facing the situation today whereby all sorts of style have already been done to saturation, “choice” becomes even more important, as choice in itself comes to manifest a certain personal feeling about art. After China’s rapid initiation into Western modernism, where is the true meaning of art today? The standardization of public trends and private personal experience balance each other out, and depend on each other. This ambiguous relationship often makes an artist unknowingly fall into a sort of awkwardness. Should he participate? Should he close himself off? Or should he use a praxis of fusion, trying to reach some mysterious standard? None of these options will allow him to relax. In my opinion, if art is still to have meaning today, it should be built on a foundation of “close connection” to our current reality. In the long term, art can only be enchanting to people in the manner of a vintage wine, and cannot give people stimulus and satisfaction in the short term like a catalyst. A work, or rather an artist’s sensibility about art, cannot bear too much philosophical substance or sociological meaning. A work can only help people to think about the “deep questions” of history, culture, reality that they are facing in their own individual way. A work can provide information that resonates with the viewer, and only this. What I can do, besides having to make clear my own role, is to continue to exhibit my own “introverted imaginary” artistic keynotes. I can cut from this extremely individual perspective into society and culture, concretely expressing the corners of life that I feel and know, and I cannot sway back and forth among the “transcendent themes” of the vague artistic forms and cultural concepts of “abstraction,” far removed from any sense of time and space.

The major elements in my recent works, besides the complex thoughts given to us by history and reality, came directly from private collections of old family photos, and from the charcoal drawings one sees on the street throughout China. I have no way of saying whether these old photos that have undergone spiritual polishing open a road into the deep recesses of the soul, but they seem to throng my mind with thoughts, and I become unwilling to let them go. Perhaps precisely because in these times such old photos do more than fulfill people’s nostalgic yearnings, or perhaps in their visual language that is pure and direct, yet full of illusion, they justify my loathing for enigmatic formalism and exaggerative romanticism. At the same time, old photos and charcoal are a pictorial language, embodying things with which I am very familiar and for which I can no longer even spare a glance, among them the traditional and particular aesthetic preferences of the normal Chinese, such as obfuscation of individuality and emphasis on collectivity, and an implicitness that is nonetheless full of poetic and aesthetic particularity. Of course, as an artist living in this age, I cannot shake off my art historical education, nor the influence philosophy, psychology, or many other aspects of modern civilization. So from one point of view, I am actually creating an effect of “fake photographs”—taking things which are already “ornamental” and “re-ornamenting” them. In this process of “re-ornamentation,” I consciously implement the “painterly effects” that everyone sees in my works—such as my attention to color and brushstrokes—with the greatest meticulousness, leaving only a piece of history and life that has been rendered vague and confused, souls struggling one by one under the forces of public standardization, faces bearing emotions smooth as water but full of internal tension, the ambiguous fates of life lived amidst contradictions passed back and forth among the generations.

I still expect my own works to have a kind of psychological resonance. This is the sensitivity of art, and I believe this is very important to an artist. At the same time, living in an age that we could call complicated, I still respect an ancient principle: art should manifest a person’s unique disposition.

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