NYT, August 31, 2005
A Chinese Painter's New Struggle: To Meet Demand
By DAVID BARBOZA

BEIJING - In a large warehouse studio on the outskirts of China's capital, Zhang Xiaogang was trying to explain how he goes about painting each day.

He said he liked to work deep into the night, smoking Chinese Honghe cigarettes, drinking herbal tea and listening to the music of "Buddha Cafe" or Air's "Talkie Walkie."
[image] Zhang Xiaogang in his large studio on the outskirts of Beijing. Paintings are from his "Bloodline: Big Family" series, based on formal photos from the Cultural Revolution era. (Chang W. Lee/The New York Times)

Much of the time, he said, he simply locks himself up in his studio every afternoon about 2 o'clock, trying to concentrate.

"When I start painting I can't stop," he said gesturing to a large portrait of a boy soldier, one of about a dozen paintings that line his 3,000-square-foot studio. "I've got to get this side down before it dries. When I painted this piece I got distracted. The color changed a little. You probably can't notice it, but I can."

Mr. Zhang, 47, is one of China's best-known artists. For years, his works - like those of other avant-garde artists of his generation - could not be exhibited in China, often because they were deemed too modern or politically questionable.

But now his paintings are not only collected by wealthy Westerners and leading foreign museums, but they are also increasingly fashionable among well-to-do Chinese and are being exhibited in China's state-run museums and galleries.

Early next year, one of Mr. Zhang's largest works - a mural 39 feet long by 9 feet high - is to be unveiled in the subway system being built in the bustling southern city of Shenzhen, alongside works of two other leading contemporary artists, Wang Guangyi and Fang Lijun.

Much of Mr. Zhang's acclaim over the last decade stems from a series, called "Bloodline: Big Family," of largely black-and-white oil paintings inspired by formal family photographs of the 1960's and 70's.

Mr. Zhang's rendering of these portraits - the figures often devoid of emotion, seemingly trapped in a time that still defies explanation - has become his trademark. Few other Chinese artists' works are so easily identifiable here, or so popular.

At a time when China's contemporary-art scene is sizzling, with dozens of galleries opening in Beijing and other cities and works being auctioned for record prices, few artists are as celebrated as Mr. Zhang, whose paintings can now fetch as much as $200,000 each.

"You can't even get his works right now," said Weng Ling, director of the Shanghai Gallery of Art. "He's that popular. There is a long waiting list even to show his works." But for such a highly sought-after artist, Mr. Zhang has an unassuming manner. He dismisses talk of his fame.

"I'm just a simple painter," he said. "I just paint what appeals to me."

But he is hardly simple. It has been a long journey for this artist whose early years were marked by depression and whose first paintings were filled with skulls and dismembered bodies.

Mr. Zhang was born in 1958 and grew up in western China's Sichuan Province, the third of four sons born to government officials. So he was 8 in 1966 when the Cultural Revolution touched off a decade of political and social upheaval in China - one in which students assaulted their teachers, children denounced their parents and party elders paraded through the streets wearing dunce caps.

Almost every night at the beginning, Mr. Zhang said, "people came to our house and asked my parents to make confessions about what they did wrong."

His parents were later sent to work in the countryside, leaving him and his three brothers in the care of an aunt for several years. He spent much of his childhood drawing.

"My mother was afraid I'd go out and get in trouble so she taught me how to draw," he explained. "And that's what I did."

He spent long hours sketching at home, he said, imitating comic strips and drawing heroic battle scenes of Chinese fighting against Japanese.

In early 1976, like so many youngsters in China, he was sent to farm in the countryside. But after Mao died later that year and the Cultural Revolution drew to a close, colleges around the country began reopening and Mr. Zhang enrolled at the Sichuan Academy of Art.

He studied Soviet-style realism but says he gravitated toward Western art, particularly the works of van Gogh, Gauguin and Dalí.

After college, he worked briefly designing sets and costumes for a dance troupe. Then he taught art in Sichuan and began searching for his own style.

He became part of a group of avant-garde painters who came to prominence in the 1980's. But after the 1989 military crackdown on the demonstrations in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, many of these artists went underground or abroad.

Mr. Zhang's works were not the most controversial then, but like others they were seen as breaking sharply with tradition. As a result they were often barred from being shown in Chinese galleries and were mostly acquired by foreigners.

He now says it took him 10 years to find his own style, and that along the way he battled depression and alcoholism. For six years, he says, he painted almost exclusively about death.

"I didn't feel any hope," he said of this period. "I couldn't find my place in society."

The turning point came in 1992, he said, as China was beginning to open up again. He began to feel that his surrealistic, symbolic works were too derivative of Western art. That year, he traveled to Germany, he said, where he saw and admired the photographlike paintings of Gerhard Richter.

But when he returned home, Mr. Zhang said, he decided to do something that would more faithfully express what he calls "the Chinese emotion." Then he came across some old family photographs.

"I thought, 'This is good,' " he said. "I want to show the family, the connections between people."

But in his portraits, Mr. Zhang has written, he seeks "to create false photographs," to hint at the turbulence and suppressed emotion below the surface of formal studio portraits.

In addition to studying his parents' old photographs, he said, he also paged through old books and magazines, and visited antiques shops. Even some friends began offering him old photographs.

In 1993, his first family portraits - black-and-white oils with occasional flashes of color - became the beginning of his "Bloodline" series.

It is a series that over the years has evolved from slightly surreal portraits of family members, often dressed in the Mao jackets that were standard in the 1960's and 70's, to softer-toned, almost ethereal figures. Over time, the faces have become increasingly alike, and now all the people in a particular family portrait - male and female - have the same features. They are a single person, he says, a composite drawn from images of his mother and his own imagination.

"I want everyone to be the same," he says. "During one period in China, all families were considered virtually the same family." His parents are still unaware of their roles in his paintings, he said.

"I rarely talk to them about art," he said. "They don't really understand this. They don't ask anything about it. They care more about my health. My mother will ask, 'How are you feeling?' "

Until 1997, Mr. Zhang said, exhibition spaces in China always told him that they could not get government approval to show his works.

That's no longer a problem. State-controlled galleries are eager to show his works, which have won critical acclaim here and abroad.

"He's now one of the most important figures from the post-89 group," said Vinci Chan, a specialist in Asian contemporary art at Christie's auction house in Taiwan. "This is an important transition group. Most of these guys broke the rules. Before them, there was really only traditional work."

In 1999, Mr. Zhang moved from Kunming, in the south, to Beijing because, he said, this is the country's cultural center. And he now lives here with his longtime girlfriend.

He likes to talk about his daughter, now 11, from a marriage that ended in divorce, and says she has also taken to painting. Photographs of her, of friends and his works crowd his studio walls, along with announcements of gallery openings, pencil sketches and, of course, the old family portraits that have guided his painting.

Today, Mr. Zhang's studio looks like an assembly line of large-scale black-and-white portraits. He does all the painting himself, he said, without an assistant. But he admits to feeling pressure to produce to meet the demand.

"See that one over there," he said, pointing to a charcoal drawing on canvas of a group of young boys. "I sketched that over a year ago and I still haven't started painting it yet."

That demand is evident in visits to local galleries, where reproductions of Mr. Zhang's images show up on posters, postcards, book jackets, bookmarks and other objects. And he has agents in Hong Kong, Paris and New York.

Still, he denies that success has spoiled him.

"I'm lucky," he said. "The things I like to draw the market has accepted. But I won't just follow the market. If I paint something and the market doesn't like it now, maybe it'll like it some other time."

Audio Slide Show:
Family Portraits
David Barboza discusses the newfound success of Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang.
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/arts/20050831_ZHAN_AUDIOSS/

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/31/arts/design/31zhan.html?oref=login

 

 

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