Often referencing events and narratives from China's political history, Zhang Xiaogang's works reflect an interrogation of contemporary Chinese identity and the scope of personal and collective memory.
Read MoreZhang is best known for his 'Bloodline' series of individual and family portraits, which he began painting in the 1990s. Reminiscent of black-and-white family photographs from the Cultural Revolution period, Zhang's muted oil paintings depict various austere figures with subtly exaggerated features. He seamless blending of tone and edge gives the works a hazy, sepia-tinged appearance, enhancing their dream-like, surreal qualities.
Selected works from the 'Bloodline' series possess an ambivalent satirical edge. My Dream: Little General (2005) depicts a boy wearing military uniform, his lower half unclothed to reveal comically small genitals. A Big Family (1995) presents mother and daughter figures, who frame an unnaturally red-toned male between them.
Other 'Bloodline' works frame extreme close ups of faces—magnifying unsettling glassy-eyed gazes—or headshots reminiscent of passport photos. Whether their vacant expressions are understood as passive, stoic, or conformist, Zhang's anonymous caricatures articulate a uniformity of identity as perceived in the aftermath of the revolution.
Zhang Xiaogang's 'Green Wall' series (2008) is comprised of seven hand-coloured etchings depicting various disquieting interiors in snapshot-like compositions, mostly devoid of human presence. Each interior features a green wall, a common feature of both public and private spaces in 1960s and 70s China, evoking an ambiguous sense of nostalgia, clouded by the anxieties of the present.
Zhang has revisited the 1989 events at Tiananmen Square multiple times in his career. Early works such as Nightmare Series No. 1 (1989) and Lost Dream: Man with a Crown of Thorns (1989) show images of dismembered bodies in nightmarish compositions that reveal influences from Surrealism and Cubism.
Later works such as 'Tiananmen Square' (1993) and the seven silkscreened editions of the 'Tian'anmen Series' (2007) depict the Tiananmen gate amidst the empty square. In an interview with ArtAsiaPacific, Zhang recognises the significance of Tiananmen in his life and practice—marking a more outward, political turn in his artworks. Deliberately absent of human presence, Zhang's Tiananmen works can be seen to reflect the trauma of China's collective consciousness, the tensions between state and individual, and the erasure and rewriting of memory.
Zhang Xiaogang has also worked in collage, sculpture, and installation. His sculptures often serve as extensions of his 'Bloodline' paintings, as illustrated in the cast bronze statues of children in military uniform in My Ideal (2008).
