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Big Family Portrait
2007
Xiaogang Zhang
Works on paper
70 x 98 cm
With their uniformly smooth faces, empty, fixed gazes and clonelike appearance, Xiaogang Zhang’s portraits depict the homogeneity of a society where collectivity counts more than individuality. Nothing seems to distinguish the children from their parents, or, even more disturbing, the wives from their husbands. The individual is reduced to a fraught, interchangeable clone. The recurrent features of these black-and-white portraits are the red figure of a male child and, above all, a discreet yet omnipresent red “bloodline”, an unbreakable conduit linking both the members of a family together and individuals to the community. On each of the impassive faces that allow no emotion to show, a reddish patch in the form of a scar or skin graft seems to represent a wound or inner suffering.
Text : Carole Vantroys.
Translation : Pamela Hargreaves.
Text : Carole Vantroys.
Translation : Pamela Hargreaves.
Xiaogang Zhang
China
Born in 1958
Born in Kunming, Yunnan Province, China.
For some years now, the works of this prominent figure on the avantgarde Chinese art scene have reached record prices in the sales rooms. His series of enigmatic family portraits, grouped together under the emblematic title Bloodlines, established his reputation in the 1990s. Reviving the Cultural Revolution tradition of family portraits, mixed with European Surrealism, this Chinese painter with a modern soul has made questions of identity and memory the core subjects of his investigations. Attempting a pictorial psychoanalysis of contemporary Chinese society, he presents its anxieties and traumas, stating all the while: “On the surface the faces in these portraits appear as calm as still water, but underneath there is great emotional turbulence.”
Text : Carole Vantroys.
Translation : Pamela Hargreaves.
For some years now, the works of this prominent figure on the avantgarde Chinese art scene have reached record prices in the sales rooms. His series of enigmatic family portraits, grouped together under the emblematic title Bloodlines, established his reputation in the 1990s. Reviving the Cultural Revolution tradition of family portraits, mixed with European Surrealism, this Chinese painter with a modern soul has made questions of identity and memory the core subjects of his investigations. Attempting a pictorial psychoanalysis of contemporary Chinese society, he presents its anxieties and traumas, stating all the while: “On the surface the faces in these portraits appear as calm as still water, but underneath there is great emotional turbulence.”
Text : Carole Vantroys.
Translation : Pamela Hargreaves.
Artwork of
Xiaogang Zhang
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