Zhang Xiaogang was born in 1958 in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province in southern China. When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, Zhang was eight years old. At the age of 18, Zhang was sent to 'reeducation camp' to labor alongside peasants. Following the collapse of the Cultural Revolution, Zhang Xiaogang was accepted into the Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts in Chongqing in 1977. He graduated with a B.A. degree in Oil Painting in 1982. In 2007, Zhang was appointed as a professor at Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts. The artist current lives and works in Beijing, China.
Read MoreBased on personal experience and memory, Zhang expresses man’s experiences and emotions through his narrative paintings, placing an emphasis on the existence of history and memory in the preset. In 1995 Zhang Xiaogang presented his Bloodline: Big Family series in an affiliate exhibition during the 46th Venice Biennale. Drawn from formal family portraits, the paintings represent both the individual and the faceless masses of China at once. The figures, often dressed in identical Mao suits, have distinctive red blood lines which demonstrate the links between people. Zhang continues the investigations of the unceasing revision of memory in his following works.
In his Green Wall series, the artist uses the green wall as a common yet distinctive symbol in the 1960s and 70s in china, evokes the poignancy of memory and a nostalgia for the past—not a real past but a reimaged one, shaped by the anxieties and the wishes of the present. Zhang also begins his experiment on transferring the images of his painting to three dimensions sculptures.
Since 1989 Zhang has had eighteen solo exhibitions and has participated in nearly 150 group exhibitions. His major exhibitions include Zhang Xiaogang: Shadows in the Soul at Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (2009), Revision at PACE, New York (2008) and Zhang Xiaogang at Sara Hilden Art Museum, Tampere, Finland (2007). His work can be found in numerous public collections worldwide, including Shanghai Museum, Fukuoka Museum of Art, National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Pacific Asia Museum in California, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Musée de Picardie in Amiens, France.
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