SECTION THREE
RETURN TO “BLOODLINES”, 1992-1996
Surveying the circle of master works of European art history I like, I decided to reject Expressionism, because at that time I had two choices, I always thought of Surrealism in conjunction with Expressionism, and always wanted to combine them; only later did I realize that they were two separate systems and I had to renounce one side.
--Zhang Xiaogang, quoted in Huajiadi: Conversations with Witnesses to the Development of Chinese Contemporary Art (1979-2004), 2005.
From these old pictures, I read Chinese history, psychology, and beliefs.
--Zhang Xiaogang, Autobiography, 2014
Ideological Conflicts
In June 1991, Zhang Xiaogang wrote the following humorous, self-deprecating, lines on the back of his photograph taken at the entrance of the Institute’s Chunyuan Dormitory:
The affected poseur standing there lost in thought lives in the second building off this path; the plump rat beside him has not been added in by the photographer because throughout this building people are living in harmony with small creatures like this. Summer is here, so he has moved in a whole new family from out of town, to steal the cooking oil. They are fond of climbing everywhere, especially on people’s beds, desks, and cupboards; to retain their dignity, people have to go out to buy rat poison, which they spray wherever the rodents like to hang out, so that their excessively excitable friends can get a good night’s sleep.
After transferring in 1986 to the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts to teach, Zhang Xiaogang often described the rodent dramas played out in his room, in letters to Ye Yongqing and other friends. In that time of ubiquitous poverty, this environment and living conditions were nothing untoward in the day to day lives of creative young artists, such hassles being, in their eyes, amusing dramas.[1] However, as everyday life became increasingly complex, economic worries became more apparent. In fact, in Zhang Xiaogang’s letters of the 1980s we often find references to the cost of living and finances, about which he invariably provided figures and details. The controversial 1989 China Modern Art Exhibition in Beijing provided Zhang Xiaogang and Mao Xuhui with an opportunity to sell works and receiving what was for them a large sum in US dollars at that time made them feel excited, yet awkward.
Entering the 1990s, the correspondence between Zhang Xiaogang and Mao Xuhui was still devoted to a serious discussion of topics related to art, but from time to time there are also references to the hope of selling works. After Mao Xuhui returned to Kunming when the 1989 China Modern Art Show ended on 23 March, his letter to Zhang Xiaogang ended as follows: “If there are people who want to buy paintings, please introduce them to me in Kunming!” In September, in a letter to Zhou Chunya who had already gone to Germany, Zhang Xiaogang, wrote: “In late October or in December, I might travel to Beijing to have a small exhibition and try to sell some paintings. The economy in China next year will be terrifying”. In October, he wrote in a letter to his classmate Yang Qian, now in the United States, that a woman from the Spanish Embassy in China had organized a private exhibition at her apartment in Beijing: “I have received a letter from the Spanish Embassy, inviting me to Beijing to hold an exhibition before the end of this year. Even though I am not keen to go, I am just hoping to sell a few pictures to prepare for next year”. It goes without saying that at this time it was still extremely difficult for avant-garde artists in China to sell any work. [2]
After June 1989, moreover, there was no possibility of staging an exhibition of modern art in China. Modern art continued to be regarded as an expression of bourgeois ideology and was the target of vigilant officials. A number of artists, such as Gu Wenda, Xu Bing, Huang Yong Ping (Huang Yongping), and Wu Shanzhuan, successively left China and headed for the United States, France, or other European countries. Gao Minglu, who had been a leading critic of the New Wave art movement, went to the United States, while the younger critics Fei Dawei and Hou Hanru went to France. For various reasons, these artists and critics were convinced that there were too many difficulties at home in China and that it was necessary to go to study in the West where there were many more opportunities. At that time, going to Europe or the United States was something most Chinese artists and critics yearned to do. In 1989, Gu Dexin, Huang Yong Ping, and Yang Jiecang had an exhibition in the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; in 1990, Fei Dawei curated ‘Chine Demain pour Hier’ in Pourrières, France; and in 1991 this personable and cultured critic also curated the show titled “Exceptional Passage” in the Fukuoka Museum in Japan. Most people in China at that time had little understanding of these exhibitions, but the news of them always aroused admiration; receiving letters from abroad was also always a joy, arousing admiration and stirring curiosity in the recipient.
In the summer of 1990, Lü Peng was conducting research on Mao Xuhui for a study of modern Chinese art he was writing, and so he travelled to Kunming. At Big Mao’s home, he joined in wide-ranging discussions with Mao Xuhui, Ye Yongqing, and Pan Dehai. This was a time when people no longer cared to discuss or analyze personal psychological issues, and all discussion of metaphysical problems also seemed to cease automatically in the wake of the political “events” in Tiananmen Square in the previous year. Art circles were rendered more or less aphasic, having almost nothing to say about artistic issues. Invariably the topic of conversation would quickly shift from politics and philosophy to bread and butter issues and the general economic situation. Yet those artists and critics who had travelled abroad from China created, for those left behind, the illusion that, in intellectual terms and in terms of survival, artists were basically safe in Western countries. In the process of writing about his artist friends and acquaintances in The History of Modern Art in China: 1979-1989, Lü Peng acquired an excellent feel for the economic dilemmas faced by modern artists in different cities of China. In Hangzhou, for example, Lü Peng remembers, as though it were only yesterday, descending the rickety and dangerous stairs from Zhang Peili’s apartment and getting a ride through the drizzling rain in the crude tricycle Zhang Peili used to take friends to cheap restaurants to eat. Mao Xuhui continued to paint in a cramped dormitory room that belonged to the local film company; his works filled every available space in the room, making it difficult to even turn around. Ye Yongqing wrote in his memoirs how in Kunming, every artist found that the largest space available to show their work to guests was their bed! It therefore hardly comes as a surprise that at that time, artists, like other people, were turning their attention to their material conditions, beginning with their basic living space and surroundings. As some artists in Wuhan said, artists and critics had plummeted from the metaphysical to the physical plane, and were now concerned with the most basic material problems. Everyone had become aware of the seriousness of this new problem: when official ideology and government institutions utterly refused to extend any support to artists who chose to paint modern art, what resources were there to provide conditions for the survival and development of modern art? On 16 October 1990, the socially engaged Mao Xuhui, whose powerful Expressionist style had once won him enthusiastic followers, revealed in a letter to Zhang Xiaogang his personal resignation and despair:
In recent days, apart from just two meals, my only luxuries are tea and fruit. I read some of Laozi’s teachings on the Way and his metaphysics for living a calm, pure, and chaste life, and for thinking in a passive way. A few days ago I sent several books to [Ye] Yongqing, but I do not know whether he received them. Among them was an excellent book about Laozi, which I can send you, if you like. [3]
For a member of the avant-garde in the 85’ art movement period, such a state of mind might seem surprising, yet, as a Chinese, Zhang Xiaogang understood his friend and, in fact, he too often read works treating Chinese traditional philosophy to see if the road along which he was travelling would have met their expectations and ideals. At this time, Zhang Xiaogang was still psychologically disturbed by the political events of the previous year:
Whether I’m in decadent Chengdu or in the bleak and lonely Huangjueping district of Chongqing, I can never get rid of that persistent sense of isolation. It is only when I take up my brush that I can temporarily drive away the emptiness and despair plaguing me day and night. I believe that the problem is not me. Everyone is exhausting himself trying to get used to the new situation. We acknowledge this dumbfounding and dreary reality and at the same time we don’t let the devil get to us, by painting more freely on the canvas.[4]
This was the period when Zhang Xiaogang was painting his demonic heads and, in his hallucinatory psychological state, “the spirit of death” was beside him; he had also not shaken off the madness and isolation brought on by his nightmares: “regardless of whether I am strolling along Chunxi Road in ‘downtown’ Chengdu or far from the hubbub in tiny Huangjueping, everywhere I can see the ‘spirit of death’ stretching out his long tongue, licking people’s souls, making people crazy, and turning them into piles of refuse at the roadside”. He also described his everyday situation and surroundings in letter to Mao Xuhui:
Autumn is coming and once again Chongqing is beginning to enter the world of endless rain when you can smell the decay and mildew everywhere. Yet all the small animals, including the stomach churning plump rats, begin to perk up....[5]
Contrary to what most people had imagined would happen, the government did not stop making reforms in the economic field. On 19 December 1990, the Shanghai Securities Exchange Commission was set up in the ballroom of the west wing of the Pujiang Hotel, which hsitorically epitomized capitalist Shanghai, having set up in 1846 as Richards’ Hotel and Restaurant to later become the Astor House Hotel (1859-1959). On 17 January 1992, Deng Xiaoping left Beijing by train to undertake what would be a significant investigative tour of Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, and Shanghai; after returning to Beijing on 21 February, Deng Xiaoping’s instructive remarks to local Party officials and relevant personnel during that investigative tour were made known. The important points made during Deng Xiaoping’s “southern tour” were: we must adhere to the line, guidelines, and policies determined by the Communist Party’s Eleventh Plenary Session, and insist that without economic reform and economic development we will only go down a blind alley; he said that it was normal that there would be different opinions regarding the reform and opening up, but now was not the time for discussion; while China should be wary of the “right”, she should be most wary of the “left”; for economic development, we should pay attention to stability and coordination, but “development must be the absolute principle”. The views on economic development expressed in the speeches made by Deng Xiaoping during his “southern inspection tour” subsequently became the basic principles directing the CPC Central Committee’s later work. In fact, the entire “Eastern European upheaval”, which extended from the time of the Polish Round Table talks between the Polish government and the Solidarity movement, which began in February 1989 and ended with the Polish Round Table Agreement of April 1989, until the Constitutional Assembly elections in Bulgaria in June 1990, was sounding urgent alarm bells through the conclaves of the Central Committee in Beijing after June 1989. People discussed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the execution of Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena in Romania in the same breath as the political events that ended so tragically in Tiananmen Square, and everyone wondered what China’s future could possibly be. As early as September 1989, Deng Xiaoping told the visiting Chinese-born American Nobel Prize winning physicist Professor Tsung-Dao Lee (b. 1926) that no aspect of the policy of reform and opening up that China had pursued for previous ten years would change, because whoever tried to change it would fall from power. On 10 November, Deng told the visiting United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that he could assure him that whoever wanted to “turn back the clock” would fall from power. The ten years of reform and opening up might have presented some small problems that now needed to be corrected, but its successes and achievements were substantial. In all these speeches and comments, Deng Xiaoping revealed his highly flexible political strategy: consolidate power, especially for the express purpose of consolidating the socialist system under the continuing and unchanging leadership of the Communist Party, but in economic development, the principle of the market economy cannot be changed and there should be an accelerated implementation of economic reforms. As can be imagined, after the People’s Liberation Army cleared Tiananmen Square on 4 June, there were people in the Communist Party who hoped that events had provided the opportunity to reconsider the principles and policies of the Party and the country, and consider whether there was a need to continue to introduce experiences and methods used to manage “market economies” in Western capitalist countries. However, Deng Xiaoping’s “southern tour speeches” reiterated the need to further develop the market economy, rather than the planned economy, and disregarded the question of whether this denoted any essential difference between socialism and capitalism. He argued that a planned economy is not equivalent to socialism, and that capitalism also requires planning; moreover, a market economy is not equivalent to capitalism, because socialism also has markets. Planning and the market are simply economic means. These ideas quickly became the authoritative position in the Party, and they were a clear-cut and positive reply to people who questioned the need for continued economic reforms, especially the diehards’ question of whether there was any need to continue to promote the market economy. Deng Xiaoping avoided market-related discussion of the political system and was clearly not interested in discussing the issue; he clearly seemed to be convinced that at this time there was no need to discuss this “academic” issue. He believed that a socialist country under the rule of the Communist Party could still carry out economic reforms, but as for the accompanying institutional changes introduced in East European socialist countries, he maintained that China’s national conditions were different, and the situations were not analogous.
Rapid economic changes quickly followed: in March 1992, approval was given for establishment of the Shanghai Yangpu economic development zone; on 28 April, the State Council issued approval for the State Economic Reform Commission and the State Council Production Office’s Report on the Symposium on Joint-Stock Enterprise Pilot Work, which called for bold advances in joint-stock experiments; 12-19 October, the Fourteenth Congress of the Communist Party was held in Beijing, and the conference stressed that the basic socialist system and the market economy be combined, in order to establish a “socialist market system”. On the basis of the ideological liberation and experience of the early 1980s, the Party and its leadership now pushed more rapidly and effectively in promoting the market economy.
It was readily apparent that, in addition to the need to respond to political turmoil, the Communist Party leadership headed by Deng Xiaoping had no intention of ever reversing on the identified path of economic development. As a result, the country’s social and economic life, under the daily barrage of propaganda about the market economy in the news and press, seemingly returned to normal, moving quickly in the direction of a market economy. Life went on, as did the possibilities of survival; those who were disappointed with reality and politics had no way of bringing about any change in the status quo. This new social and political context again provided career possibilities and people became accustomed to the changes taking place. Yet despite all this, for a long time modern artists and critics felt that reality was bleak; the era of the earlier avant-garde had passed and, to a large extent, artists felt they were witnessing the decline, or even failure, of modernism. Ye Yongqing has described this rethink and recall of the earlier thinking in modern art circles:
The Modern Art Exhibition in Beijing in 1989 marked the end of the 1980s. The many unorthodox artistic experiments and the sensational and farcical performance artworks presented on the first floor of the National Art Museum made me feel enervated as though I was totally lacking in artistic imagination. Once Xiao Lu fired her pistol shot, I felt that my classical modernist works that were exhibited on the second floor of the East Room of the Museum were even further eclipsed. However all this innovation did not usher in an era of cultural renaissance, on the contrary, it sucked the last breath of revolutionary enthusiasm and creative imagination out of the New Wave art...... For young people of my age, the mainstream intellectual culture of the 1980s had always provided us with a big stage, and we had waited excitedly for this opportunity to participate, only to find that all our anticipation had been squandered on a bankrupt myth.[6]
However, what were the new directions in art? What were art’s possibilities? After discussing the future with Mao Xuhui, Ye Yongqing, and Pan Dehai in Kunming, Lü Peng went to Hunan, where he discussed with Li Luming, Zou Jianping, and Sun Ping how to revive the now defunct magazine Painters (Huajia) and give it a new direction, in order to continue to promote the development of new art. Taking into account the newly found legitimacy of the term “market”, they decided to name the new magazine Art •Market (Yishu • Shichang). No-one seemed to notice the dot placed between the concepts of art and market in the magazine’s title, but this signaled that while they were targeting art, art and the market could still not be equated and so the two must be kept separated by a dot. However, in this particular period, seeking possibilities for modern art through the market was a safe strategy. Thus, art was still art, and the market was the market, but in defining “‘the market” as a strategy at the outset, they did not realize that the Chinese contemporary art market would be fully shrouded by the market for many years to come.
In January 1991, in the first issue of Art • Market (hereafter Art and Market), Wang Guangyi used the term “contemporary art” for what in China had been previously termed “New Wave”, “avant-garde art”, or “modern art”. For the past few years, the Northern artist Wang Guangyi’s artistic concepts were gradually moving towards the rejection of essentialism, in stark contrast to the artists of the Southwest, and many found Wang’s use of glitzy vocabulary at that time startling. Yet now, he was exercising his imagination to predict the future of Chinese contemporary art:
As we can at present see, China’s contemporary art has not yet attained for itself academic stature, and the reasons for this are very complex. The main reason for this is that it does not have the backing of a powerful national corporation. The success of post-War United States art is essentially the market success of national corporations, without which artists like Pollock, de Kooning, and Jasper Johns would not have the success they enjoy today. You just used the term “art industry”, which is excellent, because it touches on the question of circulation. I think that at the outset we must be part of this circulation and significance will emerge once we are on track. Right now, we have begun to participate in this process of market circulation, so I predict that in five years time China’s “products” will hold their own in the world art industry.
Wang Guangyi’s rather exaggerated attitude at that time would be later vindicated, but this would actually be the result of the background provided by the national implementation of the market economy. By that time, social life had recovered from the repressive political atmosphere, but trading and money had now become the most widely discussed topics. Yet in art circles, the majority of artists still believed that talk about money was taboo. Wang Guangyi, in response to a question from the editors of Art and Market about the relationship between art and money, had this to say:
This question is essentially a question about philosophy or economics. As an artist, I believe money and art are both good things. It has taken thousands of years for people to discover that only art and money can bring joy and meditation. Being an artist, I love money like everyone else; the difference is that, unlike ordinary people who use money to live a luxurious life, the artist uses money to enhance his prestige. The greater charisma an artist has, the more valuable are his artworks; here a myth can play a role in metaphysically shaping and transforming secular reality. The process of interplay between these two realms can advance art, and what should be described as the thesis and antithesis of the “Matthew Effect” in contemporary art control the artist, the critic, and the birth and death of the myth of the art market.[7]
These views of Wang Guangyi were exaggerated and bold, and he was clearly inspired and stimulated by theory and practical needs. Then teaching in Wuhan, Wang Guangyi and other artists and critics in that city often discussed structuralism, Derrida’s deconstruction, and Foucault’s theory of power. Indeed, from 1989, Wang Guangyi had turned to a new experiment, by first covering world famous paintings (prints or oil reproductions) with industrial paint; by 1990 he had completed his first Great Criticism (Da pipan) series, prompting the editors of Art and Market to plan how to promote his new works in art circles and in the imagination of the market. Notwithstanding, the contemporary artists based in Wuhan, including Wang Guangyi, Shu Qun, Ren Jian, Wei Guangqing, and some others, were also beginning to experiment with the Pop Art style. During this period, Lü Peng frequently travelled between Chengdu and Wuhan, at a time when everyone in the scene was searching for new possibilities expressed in new concepts and terms. These artists were inspired by Derrida’s thinking on the “bottomless chessboard” on which Being is put into play; “power” rather than “thought” was a frequently used term, and the leading contemporary artists in Wuhan seemed to feel that modernist philosophy had failed and postmodern philosophy was vital. At least, they found the theoretical basis for discarding essentialism within postmodern philosophy and, on the basis of what was previously called “rational painting”, they recognized and established their new art. In October 1990, Wang published an article in Jiangsu Fine Arts titled “Cleaning up Humanist Enthusiasm” (Guanyu qingli renwen reqing), in which he wrote:
Artists who experience a shared delusion will take that mirage as empirical evidence. From this starting point, they generate a mutually conceived mythology in which all experiences are handled in an exaggerated or amplified humanistic manner. When an artist is engulfed in this artificial realm of reality, he undoubtedly believes the ‘myth’. From the renaissance until today, this mythical feeling deluded many artists into believing that they were conducting a conversation with the gods. At the end of the 20th century, some European artists began to express doubts about these myths, often subconsciously, like the avant-garde character Joseph Beuys, who would often mistakenly enter the myth’s murky depths. This type of tragedy was the result of succumbing to modern artistic language. Actually, it is in the perpetuation and embodiment of the language of artistic representation that modern and classical art share a common origin. To some extent, we should toss aside humanity’s passion for and dependency on art and, instead, closely examine art’s meaning. When we start to seek solutions to artistic questions, we should attempt to establish the logic and evidence in earlier cultural facts, and see how artists once used this experiential material to establish an artistic language and background. If we discover that both ‘classical art’ and ‘modern art’ left behind many questions for contemporary artists, then every individual artist is free to choose and discover problems and regard them as the logical starting point for his or her own work.[8]
In discussions in Wuhan, Lü Peng was clearly influenced and inspired by these new ideas, and although he began promoting Derrida everywhere like a zealous missionary, it was only in dim light, under the effects of alcohol and in the chaos of arguing that his understanding of the work of an artist was changing. He noted that around 1987, Wang Guangyi almost instinctively saw art history as a continuity of “texts”, and the artist realized from Gombrich’s exposition of “schema and correction” that it was impossible for original creation to exist outside of specific modifications to questions or issues emerging in the images of earlier artists. Wang Guangyi used his Post-classical (Hou gudian) series of works to announce that the idea of modernistic originality was simply a myth, at least in the sense that the history of the original work was extinguished by postmodern criticism, and the question of “what is art” can only be reinterpreted by the completion of specific individual tasks.
“Life” was a philosophical proposition, and if “life” was not deconstructed as specific behaviors and goals, the word became abstract and difficult to discuss. Apart from not being divergently treated and simply described as a type of “artistic fact”, such concepts as “suffering”, “the soul”, or “the tragedy of the soul” may become useful materials for a new art history. In this sense, the entire lexicon of modern philosophy might be ineffectual, and the concepts of essentialism are, at least, difficult to use in any explanation of new art problems. Therefore, can we ever regard what people reveal or an unconscious state in any context as culture? Thus, Wang Guangyi and his imitators to differing degrees abandoned art language’s essentialist logic, in light of their understanding of Andy Warhol’s use of advertising and ready-mades and of why postmodern painting was able to appropriate freely images from classical art and juxtapose them with images of real personalities or protagonists from political life; Wang Guangyi boldly appropriated images from “cultural revolution” posters and juxtaposed them with capitalist merchandising logos to provide a background of juxtaposed knowledge.
On 18 October, after Wang Guangyi had promoted and published his article titled “Cleaning up Humanist Enthusiasm”, Zhang Xiaogang continued to proclaim his own philosophy of life. Apart from telling Lü Peng that he was applying undiluted thick pigment with a knife to the canvas to build up images of the heads of people, wolves, and goats (Duplicated Spaces series), he was mainly providing strategic explanations of his completed works. He denied that his own art was Expressionist; some Northern artists and critics charged that the Southwestern painters had this language problem. While Zhang Xiaogang did acknowledge that his “works might have some Expressionist tendencies”, he said that after completing several works of this type and reading more Western art history, he again discovered that the artists he liked were El Greco, Balthus, de Chirico, Magritte, Giacometti, Francis Bacon, and Odilon Redon, as well as the Expressionists Anselm Kiefer and Mimmo Paladino. He said that through art he tried to express a “concern about the state of existence of contemporary man (in short, expressing the fear of death and the things beneath the surface of the inner experience), as well as the psychic experience and sense of life and death. This is the dark passage between reality and illusion, encompassing life and death”. In his view, Pop Art or Dali’s deliberately created “dreams” were things that “give me an obstructed sense of unfamiliarity. Purely rational materials and conceptual art, including abstract art, make less impact on me”. [9]
From 1990 to 1992, Lü Peng wrote frequently to Zhang Xiaogang from Wuhan and, apart from informing him about his work editing the second issue of Art and Market, told him about Jacques Derrida and of his recent discussions with artists in Wuhan:
In your letter you spoke of your recent feelings and works, which is of course very interesting. I have also had a letter from Big Mao in which he too described his “nihilistic” mood. I wrote back to him, suggesting that we should change this attitude. I think that the great advantage that artists of the Southwest have is we put art in a place closest to life, but apart from “death” and “emptiness”; other causes of our anxiety come from how we evaluate ourselves and how we are accepted by society, our circles, and the world at large. So, in a sense, we are anxious about the position of our work in the history of human culture.
Therefore, I believe that putting our work in the context of human cultural history (art history) is very important. This is not inconsistent with life’s problems, and not in conflict with the idea of art deriving from the artist’s personal experience of reality. The point is that we must stress the indispensable nature of our work in cultural history, and this requires that we are confident in the excellence of our work in the surrounding cultural history and then establish our position. To work then from an established position will be meaningful.
Because we want to go on living and because we realize that culture has no value in death, I don’t think we can put issues of “death” and “meaning” aside, and only focus on our own work; we should make it our task to solve problems that were insoluble for our predecessors. These problems may be trivial or have nothing to do with the “grand soul”, but the solution of these small problems might become a part of cultural history.[10]
Lü Peng tried to use his views gained from discussions and debates in Wuhan to persuade Zhang Xiaogang and his friends. He tried to tell the Southwestern artists that artists throughout the country were well aware of the harshness of reality and political issues, but they had responded by changing the strategy of art: the question for a contemporary artist to consider was what work and results have value in art history? Artworks were not just an emotional catharsis or the expression of personality. He wanted his friends to read new books, recommending the works of Derrida and Foucault, who he said raised questions for the Wuhan artists frequently discussing their works; these thinkers were inspired, restless souls who could relieve and revive their suffering and unbearable solitude by allowing them to see things in a new way.
It would seem that Zhang Xiaogang had little time for Lü Peng’s suggestions, or at least remained skeptical. However, he also sought ideas and support from friends, and wanted to discuss how art should be regarded in this particular period. A few days after receiving Lü Peng’s letter, he wrote a letter to Mao Xuhui (4 December 1990), in which he expressed his own ideas:
……I have written a letter to Lü Peng in which I simply outlined some of the ideas you and I had discussed in our correspondence and he “corrected” me in his reply and took the view that we should set aside some of our “personal” things, place put ourselves in the overall context of history, consciously “enter history”, and solve some of the “unsolved problems” our predecessors or others “were unable to solve”. ……
Someone at Jiangsu Art Monthly also made the same point as Lü Peng, and it seems that many people are trying to break through the lines and plunge into historical questions. But my intuition always tells me that, from the perspective of creating art, if we see art as a “career” that has nothing to do with “life” this seems to be like only appreciating music as background sound, so that Brahms didn’t need to expend passion and wisdom on composing the Deutsche Requiem and Mozart wouldn’t have devoted his life to music. We have Brahms’ Requiem today even though there have been many other requiems. If we treat art as a referent thing for some “essence” we easily fall victim to some scientific “mannerism”. I believe that inherent in the works of a true master are simplicity and innocence, and style is merely their outer garb. [11]
Zhang Xiaogang at this time was about the same age when Brahms’ mother died and Brahms composed the German Requiem, and Zhang also had to face the overwhelming loss of his mother and deal with many changes among his many friends. Zhang sought consolation and comfort in the German Requiem, and the sentiments it invoked moved him and his friends. The lyrics of the chorus in the first movement are stirring: “Blessed are those who mourn! Because they shall be comforted. Those who sow tears shall reap joy! Those whose tears flow forth shall in joy bring back the sheaves!” Although these lines and beliefs come from The Bible and are Christian, such sentiments in both substance and form not only did not seem strange to Zhang Xiaogang but were something he could even identify with; the sentiment and belief that new life comes after martyrdom were not only readily accepted by young people at this time, but from the time of Christianity’s first appearance in China, this idea had comforted and inspired generation after generation facing major crises. For Zhang Xiaogang at this time the road to salvation would, however, be consummated through art.
Soon afterwards, in January 1991, Zhang Xiaogang wrote the following in a letter to Yang Qian, his classmate in the United States:
Recently Fine Arts published a specialized introduction to many works by Chinese artists working overseas, and the magazine Painters published a similar report, but I found the works they showed very disappointing! It can be said that after 1989 many Chinese artists felt that they had been defeated. At the same time, those who could earn money by painting were happy to be riding high. Introductions provided by Taiwanese and Southeast Asian art dealers have provided many artists with challenges and choices. The pressure coming from international culture, domestic politics, and the economy has given pause for varying degrees of reflection and adjustment. The past two years have been years of silence and a test of our faith. For me, my love of art and my desire to transcend reality keep me going. Whether I become a part of art history or ever make a fortune from painting does not concern me. I will continue to find the meaning of life in action. This century has been a tragedy for the Chinese. [12]
All participants in the “New Wave” art movement were concerned about the direction and possibilities of art after 1989. In a letter to Mao Xuhui, Zhang Xiaogang sent a copy of a questionnaire compiled by Wang Lin, a teacher from the history and theory department of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, designed to ascertain the views of a selected number of Southwest artists on Chinese art after 1989, and each artist’s answer was then sent to the editor of Art Panorama (Yishu guangjiao) Yang Li in Northeastern China. All the questions related to various art phenomena since 1989: Where are we coming from? Who are we? Where are we going? The answers were published under the title “Conversations on post-89 art” in the third issue of Art Panorama in 1991. Most of the participants -Wang Lin, Wang Yi, Ye Yongqing, Zhang Xiaogang, and Mao Xuhui, filled out this form in the spring of 1991. Zhang Xiaogang provided a summary of the main characteristics of the ebullient ‘85 New Wave of several years earlier, and he talked about many of his own personal feelings at that time, and described how the movement encompassed a desire for social change; as for artistic language, he described how the movement was an “imitation of what was foreign”. However, he admitted that despite having recognized the problem and being cognizant of the objective of constructing Chinese modern art, “for a Chinese artist, it is often difficult to know where to start”. Zhang Xiaogang had never stopped subjecting his own work to scrutiny, and he admitted that he “was still a Steppenwolf”. However, he did truly feel that, “after the problem of genuine emotion emerges and hard work no longer represents the value of art, art works become useless for revealing the pressures of life”. The phenomena and complexity of life are different today from what they were in the past, and a question from any perspective could upset Zhang Xiaogang; more than a month earlier, Zhang Xiaogang poured out inner feelings in an emotionally charged letter he wrote late at night to Mao Xuhui. He described how he did not feel that he could be one of those artists, like those in Beijing, Wuhan, and Hangzhou, locked in the “language revolution”; the situation of art in this period of art appeared complex, with the “New Academism” (Xin xueyuanpai) and “New Scholarly Painting” (Xin wenrenhua) now a topic of discussion for the time being. Zhang Xiaogang and Mao Xuhui discussed these art phenomena, but they always believed that their own art could only be separated from life with great difficulty, and they believed that personal experience of suffering and confusion not only belonged to the present era. That being the case, what was the need of an artistic “language revolution” that sought to escape from the problems of life? This, of course, involved the problem of systems of artistic vocabulary, but Zhang Xiaogang continued to believe in the importance of intuition and he suspected that many people distrusted their “gut feeling” because it could not be measured or rationalized. But for artists who were producing and experimenting with conceptual art, intuition was perhaps meaningless; in the 1989 China Modern Art Exhibition, audiences were able to see Gu Dexin, Chen Shaoping, Wang Luyan, and Cao Youlian’s work titled Deconstruction (Jiexi); the idea behind this work could be simply described as the chance starting point for conceptual art “engineering” and the results of its development were not predictable. These artists emphasized the rejection of emotion and meaning, and they attempted to set up “points of inception” through different participants that provided new possibilities. This was an even purer conceptual experiment than Wang Guangyi’s much vaunted “cleaning up humanist enthusiasm”; as this group of artists explained, introducing their work:
Having an individual starting point with all human knowledge as its premise, Deconstruction initially posits quantitative relations between each physical reality. On this basis, new assumptions draw on overall relationships and thus confirm the significance of the nature of each individual existence. The human spirit acquires a new nature in the constant understanding of its objective material response. Deconstruction makes quantified measurement the basic artistic language tool: on the one hand, by eliminating the direct intervention of emotional experience and, on the other, by not arriving at conclusions. The work guides the imaginative power of thinking in the process of seeking accuracy in quantitative relationships and logically approaches a world that is possibly closer to its nature. [13]
Zhang Xiaogang had nothing to say about this type of specific artistic experiment, and it is possible that he not understand the work of the creators of Deconstruction, yet he obviously did not art which appealed only to intellect but lacked any emotional characteristics. He complained of this to Mao Xuhui in a letter written in November 1990:
This is truly an era of waste and ennui. As Ernest Becker [author of The Denial of Death, 1973) wrote: “We choked by truth. This is also an era in which art imitates God, and once it has painted its nails and applied its makeup it has lost its original purity, truth and divinity. Much of today’s art has left behind its most fundamental source, man’s struggle to live and his dialog with gods and demons, and it now draws on what is called “culture”. This state of misinterpretation is an attempt to prove the “cultural value” of a work, but it kills off the personal experience. It’s like using a computer to generate Beethoven and Rembrandt. Of course this is not meant to deny that “art” as a discipline has independent value and meaning. In my opinion, the birth of a formal language is inseparable from its author’s situation, fate, ethics, and perception of the world; I still adhere to this ancient principle, and this principle at least reminds me that art is not just a game.[14]
Zhang Xiaogang’s conviction concerning the importance of personal experience, of one’s “life situation”, and of practical experience went beyond those linguistic revolutionaries, as well as those convinced that art was a game; he agreed with the contention of Wang Guangyi and others that the rational spirit was “the constructive spirit that drove art towards more profound development”, but he still hankered after such aspects of spiritual life as familiar feelings, intuition, and experience. His life was characterized by a love-hate relationship with reality; he was familiar with the story of the Buddha and he understood what it taught as truth about the origin of life: people in the world all change, there is no constant self, life’s suffering is proven by experience, and the conflict between life and death is predestined. Therefore, neither “logic” nor the ontological “essential nature” really exists and, if it was an artificial linguistic construct, no rational analysis could override intuitive feelings. Indeed, whenever Zhang Xiaogang experienced intellectual confusion or needed support, he would remember those unforgettable earlier years, and in the still of night when he felt lonely, he would once again attempt to invite his friends to return to the past and observe reality in order to have a clear understanding of today and tomorrow, and only then could he urge himself to press on:
Big Mao, writing about this, reminds me of the days and nights we spent at the “River Seine” and in the mountain village of Nuohei. Those crazy and confusing days encompass the nightmarish life we experience today. There was that brown braised doufu and that clear alcoholic spirit that sells for twenty cents, the bad recording of Schindler’s List, books by Hermann Hesse, the hospital’s white sheets, tasty meals cooked by Xiaojin, and Sophie’s Choice, the many lonely nights spent with ridiculous television programs, little Naotou sitting alone at home making collages, bedding on the floor at the Zouma Road apartment, Tang Lei rushing about, the Kanglang fish from Zhengjiang, Francis Bacon’s screaming faces, letters to and from friends, the strange feeling of walking on crowded streets, the small wooden tables and chairs in The Little Bar, the sense of loss after having sex for the first time, the crippling shyness meeting strangers, vomiting after getting drunk, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, the howling at night of the old tomcat next door, Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony, little Christmas gifts, Giacometti’s walking figures, dirty hallways, the overwhelming need to have a real studio, strangers dropping in unannounced, the clatter of the mahjong game downstairs, and the grimy coal smoke of Huangjueping, the long nights spent smoking and chatting, cassette tapes with recordings of us singing together, the women and children who shared our poverty, my “agoraphobia”, the sad crying at night of someone’s girlfriend, rats competing with us for space and food, the trace of a sarcastic smile on someone’s face, the sad face of a woman coming up the stairs, de Chirico’s mysterious elongated shadows, the crazed and greedy crowd at the front of the store, the anxious muttering of someone eager for quick success, the onslaught of nightmares day and night, desultory reading about “structuralism” and “deconstructionism”, afternoons staring through the window at the falling rain, the silence of people gazing at your artworks, the nonsense from the head of the household you have to listen to one afternoon each week, the repetitive reality that reads like Marquez’s family history from Macondo, my mother’s morbid concern for me, man’s sense of original sin confronting Auschwitz, the lonely Kierkegaard, my wife’s miscarriage, Doctor Zhivago hounded from lane to lane, repeated and boring teaching content, Huangshan mountain resembling a potted landscape, fear in front of the face in the mirror, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, listening to Fauré’s Requiem late at night, the TV news in May 1989, the marching protestors in brightly colored clothing, the letters from abroad already opened, the phantoms of corpses on Chang’an Boulevard that will never die ... ... And so the list goes on, mixing blobs of bloodied flesh and mud, pressing heavily down into the recesses of our hearts, mixed in with the blood of our bodies flowing everywhere, mysteriously dominating our daubing on canvas…Can we simply deny the relationship between all this and “art”? If art is simply a means for rendering semantic schema or a deconstruction of some equivalent form, as some people want to prove, or the projection of an individual soul onto the overarching culture, and nothing more, then for me it would be no different from kissing a beautiful corpse.
I believe that a truly constructive spirit can never be only about some reflection on or elevation of the “nature of art”. That approach would seem to be a reversion to the belief in “art for art’s sake”, and to the theory that art is a functional tool serving society. Since the ’85 movement in particular, modern Chinese art has always found itself stuck between being treated as a functional tool and as a weird game. I’m sick of hearing degenerate literati spout the view that art is a game, and the slogan of “art for art’s sake” leaves me feeling strange; yet I am also doubtful about positioning oneself in a commanding “cultural” position through examining the “self” and then making some calculated move against international cultural practices. I believe that art expresses something eternal and great that must first come from the life of a lone individual encompassing the stimulus of culture and reality and representing human wisdom, imagination, and the deepest feelings.
The sad thing is that history is increasingly mixed up with elements of fantasy, nationalistic will, and political needs, and while we might understand the past and know the present, can we truly predict the future? I am doubtful; the future is always a mystery, not to mention that the past is not the true past and the present is even less the real present. The streets we walk are decorated with flowers and lined with skyscrapers; material goods are plentiful, people laugh, get their heads shaved and their bicycles repaired; high-pressure hoses were used to clean the streets, news of victories on TV, everything seems like a pink and green dream. In Paris there is sunshine, in New York there is money, Japanese Crown Nissans rush down the streets; all these things seem to demonstrate hopes of survival. In my opinion, there is nothing more real than the depths of night, when countless Steppenwolves howl their calls to arms in my dreams! [15]
In his letter Zhang Xiaogang mentioned of Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony, subtitled The Year 1905, written to commemorate the 40th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” in 1905. That was the year when the Japanese navy defeated Russia and internal and external woes brought Russians from all walks of life onto the streets calling for peace. The Czar feigned willingness to consult the people but the upshot was that the army was mobilized and more than 1000 people were massacred and many thousands injured on the square before the Winter Palace. Shostakovich in his score cited Mussorgsky: “‘Life is everywhere, yet the truth is so difficult”. It is self-evident why such music deeply moved young people in China at that time; it was an age of similar circumstances and a similar sense of powerlessness aroused suffering. Art was possibly the only road to personal salvation, saving people from being buffeted by the twists and turns of the era or from being swept away by the tides, allowing them to re-examine their seemingly slender but only grasp of reality.
Pink Floyd’s The Wall provided a similar emotional experience for Zhang Xiaogang, as a musical and visual refraction of Orwell’s 1984. The lines of the chorus proclaiming that we are “just another brick in the wall” had ready resonance for Zhang Xiaogang, troubled by the dilemma of how an individual could find space and voice in a stifling collective. The assembly-line production of “individuals” is terrifying: if the “self” can be manufactured in this way, what hope do we have of escaping from the Wall? Or are we condemned to remain part of the “wall”, without even realizing it? This emotional mix of anger and desire, and of simultaneous despair and hope both stimulated and relieved confused young people at that time and for Zhang’s generation the images of the wall were, of course, also a clear metaphor of collectivist slavery that tamed man and rendered him machine-like.
No intellectual and emotional outpouring could compare with the spiritual state Zhang Xiaogang acquired through Hermann Hesse’s “Haller”, who was full of inner contradictions: Zhang was clear that his own art must change, but he also insisted that his art would somehow change away from the actual situation the artist faced and change according to the logic he brought to the problem he was contemplating; he was already well aware of the new art power of artists in Beijing and other places, but he could not for this reason go with the flow and reject his own constant inner feelings and what he had spiritually gained over many years. He had already learned of the “problem” of there being no grand narrative based in reality and life experience, and he drew the analogy between his valued “grand emotions” and Li Xianting’s “grand soul”, but he believed that chance private experiences were also important, or that both contingency and the “grand emotions” were important. Moreover, these “grand emotions” were not empty “grand concepts”; he concluded that the results of his own work should “have strong personality, but also be entirely couched in a common artistic language”. Yet he was very clear about his own context: “We currently face the end of the 20th century, a century characterized as one of tragedy for the Chinese people! Westerners, who confront a plethora of problems brought on by material civilization, are now far removed from being able to represent what we most acutely feel”.[16]
New art was appearing, and in Beijing it was influenced by the art phenomenon called the “New Generation”; the characteristic of this art phenomenon is that artists concerned themselves with the people and things in their immediate environment. After the “New Generation” artists staged an exhibition in July 1991 in the China History Museum on Tiananmen Square, a type of art tending to show concern for life’s fragments and the ordinary content of everyday life quickly spread. Fan Di’an, a graduate of the history and theory department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, was one of the exhibition’s curators, and he suggested in the exhibition catalogue that the fragments of reality that these young artists portray “‘are not trivial and vacuous, but credible and real”. There was nothing distinguishing these words from earlier concepts of art, but, he pointed out, the artists of the 1980s had proposed a “presumed enemy”; in other words, the topics and themes expressed by the 1980s New Wave art were vague issues arising from the influence of Western philosophical thought. Yin Jinan, another teacher from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, used the term “close-up” (jinjuli) to describe the fact that the “New Generation” artists were depicting what they saw around them in their daily lives, and given that what the artist’s painted was known at close range, they did not transcend reality. “Unlike the ‘scar artists’ they did not reflect on their own experience of history, and unlike the ‘85 New Wave they did not use art as a tool to pursue certain cultural values. Depth and restlessness had disappeared, and what remained was cool form and calm technique”.[17] People subsequently noted the artistic phenomenon described by the critic Li Xianting as “Cynical Realism” (wanshi-xianshizhuyi). Initiated by Fang Lijun and Liu Wei, this phenomenon was closely associated with the “New Generation”, at least in the sense that Yin Jinan characterized the “New Generation” in an article on the subject, using Li Xianting’s concepts of “ridicule and self-mockery” (tiaokan yu zichao) and “the punk (popi) generation”. Indeed, Li Xianting in an article of August 1991 titled “The Sense of Boredom and the Third Generation of Artists since the Cultural Revolution” (Wuliao-gan yu Wenge hou de disandai yishujia), surveyed the younger generation of artists and used the term “Cynical Realism” to describe the art of Fang Lijun and other third generation artists. In April 1992, the Italian art student Francesca Dal Lago organized a private exhibition in Beijing for Fang Lijun and Liu Wei, for which she invited Li Xianting to write the introductory remarks, and it was in this “preface” that Li Xianting used the term “Cynical Realism” to describe art phenomena of 1988 and 1989. This was the period when Zhang Xiaogang and his circle were immersed in issues of life and death in their thinking and art practice. Li Xianting’s concept of “Cynical Realist” artists did extend to some of the “New Generation” artists; his “new art” of “Cynical Realism” referred to “the new cultural tendency that was opposed to the modernist thinking of 1980s”, which encompassed a “boredom” that was a rejection of idealism and meaning, and the concept of “the sublime” that people had once often invoked was now thrown right out of the window. All information about new art in Beijing reflected a common attitude and characteristics: new artistic phenomena no longer needed modernism’s grand narratives, having put to rest the idea that the history of art and changes in art were led by metaphysics and essentialist philosophy. However, trends of thought concerned with life, the soul, and suffering constituted the spiritual history of Zhang Xiaogang and Mao Xuhui, from the time when they first read Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Husserl, Camus, Kierkegaard, and Sartre; on the question of the life of the body and soul, they were monists, in that their experience and feel for life did not permit them to conjecture any separation of flesh and soul and construct a dualistic view of life. This led them to see the soul and language as inseparable, otherwise the flesh would die and the soul would go on forever, and so they did not want to admit that there might be a more novel interpretation of the soul. Even if language could be independent of the unconscious, or be separated from sensations, experiences, and feelings, they were not interested. Yet, they hoped to find a unique language that could explain inner feelings, and they firmly believed that even if God and other objects of faith all disappeared, life itself existed as an eternal belief, and this belief was the basis of art, and more importantly the basis of life. Thus, until March 1991, Zhang Xiaogang adhered to these personal artistic beliefs, as he explained to Li Xianting:
Perhaps we should really be grateful for the complex and changeable “reality” in which we find ourselves, because those many “realities” gradually roused us from romantic feelings and empty idealism, so that we could confront our reality through the mode of art and confront the wailing souls in the silent night. Here, I think the “language” and “the soul” are not opposed or in contradiction, but rather form a composite organism, a complete entity filled with “charm” (moli) and the specters with profound emotions. [18]
Even though Zhang Xiaogang also heeded his friends and did read Derrida, because of his understanding of art and its corresponding responses he had no interest in this kind of philosophy. He almost instinctively believed that he was charged with a mission: he saw himself as a “Steppenwolf” who could never return home. He acknowledged that he was like Haller and was antisocial, lonely, suffering, weak, and irritable, but was convinced that he could find his soul through self-dissection and questioning. Such a state of mind prompted Zhang Xiaogang’s search for answers to his questions about life and death, and asking these questions resulted in plunging himself into crisis, at the same time as he found temporary respite in producing and completing paintings. Late night loneliness and madness made Zhang feel like Haller in his boundless grief and vulnerability. This was one of the reasons why often at night he was pouring out his heart to friends, or writing letters to distant artists discussing how to find solace. In a letter of January 1992, Zhang continued to use the epithet “Steppenwolf” to describe himself and his friend Mao Xuhui, and he wanted their wives to understand and accept this state of affairs; they believed that they were fate to endure such an inevitable mental state. At this time, his early friend, later classmate, and ally in their modernist phase, Ye Yongqing had already made the transition from lyrical expressionist brush strokes to his work of Political Pop titled Big Character Poster (Da zhaotie).[19]
Study in Europe
When in March 1986 Zhou Chunya was preparing to go to Germany to study, Zhang Xiaogang congratulated him. In April, he also told Zhou Chunya: “I currently have only one wish which is to be transferred as soon as possible,[20] and then I will immerse myself in painting for several years and gather together enough material to lay a strong foundation for my future”. He again encouraged Zhou to go abroad at an early date, because “our generation should be global, and I will be praying for you back here”.[21] At this time, young Zhang Xiaogang and his classmates discussed studying abroad and going to Europe or the United States to study art. They faced the prospect with equanimity and a positive attitude, wanting simply to broaden their horizons and see the Western masters they loved in the original. In the 1980s, for a Chinese university graduate or artist to go Europe or the United States was still a great expense and difficulty, although Zhang’s classmate Yang Qian had been able to go to study in the United States as early as 1984.[22]
Around October 1989, a number of artists and critics, for various reasons, left China; most of them said leaving China was long planned but the urgency of their departure made their reasons for leaving quite obvious. However, at this particular time, Zhang Xiaogang seemed to have less interest in traveling abroad than previously, and he now seemed quite unclear about why he would even want to travel abroad. In a letter of 6 October 1989 to Yang Qian in the United States, although he mainly discussed Yang’s artworks and his own paintings completed in Kunming in the recent holidays, he then more or less repeated what he had written in a letter to Zhou Chunya in Germany and told Yang about what was happening locally and how these events distressed him: the floods in Sichuan, the heat wave in Chongqing, the earthquake in Aba, the food shortage, the rise in train fares, the sharing out of public debt, the pollution in Huangjueping, the schoolchildren dying because of pollution, and so on. He also mentioned how the topic all young teachers at the school were discussing was quitting the school to find better jobs. He explained to Yang Qian about his negative frame of mind: “If I stay here, life is already very hard, so I should go abroad. We are becoming increasingly aware of the fate and status of Chinese artists”.[23] Yang Qian in reply tried to persuade Zhang Xiaogang that it was best to go abroad, and in Yang’s view the domestic situation in China was terrible.[24] In his reply of 25 November Yang fully explained his position: “I completely understand your situation. Here we all know about what is happening in China, but it’s not appropriate to talk about it here. The only solution I can see is that you leave. Wait until things improve next year. Maybe you could get to the West through the Spanish Embassy, and then come on to the US? After I get my green card, I will do whatever I can to help you. It seems like everyone in China is clamoring to go abroad, so getting a visa will be even harder in the future, so you will need to find a way”. Yet by December, Zhang Xiaogang had dropped the idea of “escaping”, and was following another tack. He now maintained that Chinese art’s relationship with the world did not entail going out “to take on international problems”, and “the only way out was to be self-aware and independent”. He told Mao Xuhui:
A Chinese artist can only be successful abroad, if he is inseparable from the background with China’s current reality. Of course, in the special context of today, there are people who eat buns soaked in human blood. Such a person wears a Zhongshan suit and swaggers about in the presence of foreigners, declaring himself to be a “dissident”.
I received a letter from Yang who advised me to go abroad, and I’m now going to write and tell him what I really think about the idea. I think this is just not the time to flee. I don’t want to join Asia’s “Gypsy army”. If I leave China, there will be no “art” to speak of; as long as I can paint what I want to paint, I will still stay here. ……[25]
In January 1991, Zhang Xiaogang told Mao Xuhui that his wife Tang Lei had applied for a visa to go to Germany, and if all went well, she could leave next March. She obtained her visa in March and on 7 May, Tang Lei was farewelled on her flight to Germany from Beijing’s Capital International Airport by Zhang Xiaogang, Li Xianting, and Li’s wife, Liao Wen. At the airport, Zhang seemed troubled; this was not a simple send-off. As Zhang Xiaogang saw it, how Chinese people and Chinese artists saw themselves in the world had come to this:
Tang Lei left the country on 7 May. Lao Li [Li Xianting], Liao Wen, and I saw her off at the airport. The two women could not hold back their tears towards the end, which made us all really sad. Through the glass we watched her disappear into the crowd through the small door. We were surrounded by many people who were seeing off their loved ones, craning their necks and straining for a last glimpse of them; women and children were wiping away tears and waving the whole time. It was like the final farewell of jail fugitives escaping to freedom. Seeing this scene, it flashed through my mind that “the Chinese are still an inferior race”. Groups of “escapees”, filled with all sorts of fantasies, are uprooted and separated from their homes and families. Such repetitious tragedies of the times formed such a dramatic contrast with the relaxed foreign tourists at the airport. Maybe this is the concept of the “nation”! For now, the concept of “the world” still only belongs to a privileged few. In real life, we are constantly burdened down by having to carry around employee and individual identity and when you reach the international airport you realize you have to carry your ethnic and national identity with you. Who can frankly tell me who he is; the Chinese have struggled for so long to acquire the concept of the individual. Twelve years have passed since the Stars Exhibition, but has there been any advance in the “individualism” of the Chinese? Leaving behind the background of “China” (regardless of whether or not one willingly accepts this background), can contemporary Chinese artists really be called “artists”? Can their works really be “a part of world culture”? Can they take their place in the world if they wear the garb of Taoists and Confucians? ... ...[26]
Mao Xuhui replied that he fully understood his “brother’s” mood. He used a mild and conciliatory tone, out of keeping with his usual style, to comfort Zhang Xiaogang, asking Xiaogang back to his home for a drink. He said he had been very relaxed in recent months, painting a little and watching A Grade football matches on television or films either at the cinema or at home. He mentioned Hiroshima Mon Amour and Tale of Two Cities; he said that he did not rate the Soviet movie Female Commissar highly, and would prefer to see the epic War and Peace again, a taste he knew he shared with Zhang Xiaogang. He also commented that while he had never encountered any Chinese director who could make films like Sergei Bondarchuk, China had many people like the indecisive “‘Count Pierre Bezukhov’ who vacillate between war and peace, and vulnerably stand on deck in despair among people of goodwill and harmony, like brooding ‘idiots’”.
Mao Xuhui further wrote in his letter of 20 May 1991:
Summer puts people back into a good mood and now that the leaves are I take my child to swim in Xihua Park. The parasol trees look so lush and thick. I am moved by the scene. When I return to my easel, I don’t feel as tense and anguished as I did in previous years. I painted a pair of works titled The Parents’ Chairs (Jiazhang kaobeiyi), one black and one white. Everything seems ordered and there is no “domestic conflict”. I can never separate myself from the surrounding environment and the seasons.
Because prices are going up, I have largely stopped buying tapes. I keep listening to the same old things: Bach’s concertos, Rachmaninoff, and I should mention the Fourth Symphony of Brahms. That classical melancholy and grandeur belongs to the realm of ideals.
From time to time, I look through books dealing with the history of Chinese culture and of Sino-foreign relations. I also browse through some Derrida, Western literary theory, Karl Popper, Gombrich, Levi-Strauss ... ... Spring is over and summer’s here, with the mosquitoes and flies. I have very few visitors and some people aren’t welcome. We need quiet in summer, don’t we?[27]
Mao Xuhui’s wife, Xiaojin, also attached warm greetings in a note enclosed with the letter, and she provided a female perspective in complimenting “Brother” Zhang, which she knew would be effectively comforting:
Big Mao and I now often operate “independently”, because my daughter, Niuniu, came to live with me, and I have to get her into a kindergarten and move in the piano. Big Mao understands my motherly concerns, but if we immediately start living together, he won’t adapt, because I understand him! Big Mao and I, as a result, usually only see each other twice or three times a week. I don’t know what it is with you and Big Mao, but the women close to you have to be somewhat “independent” which is a bit “sad”. If only I put up with it a little longer, things will probably be all right. I miss Tang Lei; she is also very brave! She loves you so much, I absolutely know this, and when you’re back during the summer vacation, this “luxury” apartment is all yours for you and Big Mao to use.[28]
These warm and comforting words were always well received by Zhang Xiaogang who felt lonely after Tang Lei’s departure, and he said that whenever he received a letter like this from his friend Mao Xuhui he once again felt that optimistic; because of persistent feelings of loneliness, he always wanted to receive letters from friends for their therapeutic value; the letters helped overcome the psychological frustrations caused by loneliness and transform them into creative energy. So he kept up relations with all of his “old Cossack” friends, listening to what they had to say about other people and the world. In 1992, with the help of Zhou Chunya and Zhou’s teacher Reiner Kallhardt, Zhang got a chance to go to Europe. On 18 March, he submitted a report to his school seeking approval to undertake the trip:
Distinguished faculty leaders:
Professor Reiner Kallhardt of the Art College of the University of Kassel has twice visited our Academy. During his visits, I was introduced to him by Zhou Chunya. He came to my apartment and expressed his interest in my ideas and my art. He asked whether I would be interested in studying in Germany. I answered that in 1992 I hoped to see the famous “Documenta” (i.e., the Documenta international modern art exhibition in Kassel, held every four years), and take the opportunity to investigate educational opportunities at the University of Kassel. I recently received a private letter from him, inviting me for a short-term academic visit to Germany in late May this year. All costs will be borne by him personally. (Please see the attached copy of his financial guarantor undertaking and a translation of the document.)
I personally think this is a very rare opportunity: first, I can take this opportunity to observe German culture, art, and education directly, promote exchange, and enrich my knowledge, which will directly benefit my future teaching work, so that I can better contribute to our country’s education; second, since the funds for this visit are all provided by the other party, the Academy will not have to spend any money, thereby saving the nation expenditure.
The visit will be during our Academy’s summer vacation. I would travel to Germany in late May, and guarantee that I return in late August, so my trip will not affect the next semester’s teaching. Based on the foregoing, I hereby apply to the heads of the department and the Academy, for their serious consideration and approval of this submission.
In addition to explaining to the school that it would not have to contribute any funds for his trip abroad and that going abroad to study would enhance his future art teaching, Zhang Xiaogang also gave the school a guarantee that he would definitely return to China. For the school, such a guarantee was required and at this time, going abroad to study and work was, for most artists and intellectuals, a significant and decisive option. Indeed, for most Chinese at that time Europe or the United States was superior to China in every aspect: in freedom, democracy, openness, rich opportunities, and unimagined wealth; the comparisons were unimaginable. Therefore, most members of the art world who left China at this time anticipated never returning.
In July, Zhang Xiaogang, having received his passport and visa, prepared to depart. However, he was not as excited and thrilled as so many others by the prospect, and he had mixed emotions:
Look at me. I’m about to travel to the homeland of Nietzsche, Wagner, Hesse, Heidegger, and Kiefer, but I can’t help feeling somewhat sad. These glorious names once inspired us. I once regarded them as my close friends and was excited by their ideas and their lives. I don’t know when and where it started, but I’ve begun to fully realize that I’m really “Chinese”, and a wave of desolation and fear drags me back to a bottomless abyss. We must shoulder a new burden and engage in a new conversation with China. What will be the outcome? No one can really say. While this might be the situation, I am grateful that I no longer have any illusions of breaking away from my homeland and becoming one of those swashbucklers sailing the Seven Seas. [29]
Once again, in this same letter to his old friend Mao Xuhui, he recalled their history and remembered how by the Kunming moat that they dubbed the “Seine” they would talk about life, drink together, and lend each other support. Time made that not too distant past seem like an “illusion”, but this illusion inspired and encouraged them, prompting them to “endure humiliation to achieve their ideals”. Together all these experiences eventually formed the valuable experiences and firm beliefs they shared; they realized that until then these “Steppenwolves” running in the dark were still only “underground artists”,[30] but they had discovered life and wanted to liberate themselves through art. Now that he was leaving China, leaving this land, Zhang Xiaogang described his nostalgia and melancholy to his friend: “So this is how I understand what people like us feel for our land: regardless of where we go, we will always carry a heavy suitcase, loaded down with the values we acquired over the years and our fragmented ideals shattered by so many bouts of despair......”‘[31]
In early July, Zhang Xiaogang arrived in Kassel; this was not only his first visit to the quadrennial Documenta, but his first time in Europe, his first time walking the streets of European cities - from Bonn, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Stuttgart, Berlin, Hamburg, and Frankfurt, to Amsterdam and Paris. It was the first time he saw these European cities’ gardens, fountains, shops, and orderly landscapes, the first time he saw Europeans or Americans strolling in the streets, the first time he saw European families in their homes, in restaurants, and in pubs; he sat for the first time in international trains crossing countries and traversing cities, and travelled with European tourists to Paris for the first time. Above everything, of course, it was the first time he could visit the European galleries he had dreamed of for years, and he could see the originals of works by European masters that for the past decade and more in China he could only see in badly printed magazines and albums. Now, he found himself standing in front of real Greek and Roman sculptures, and in front of works by Giotto, Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael, as well as works by Balthus, Dürer, Caspar David Friedrich, and Delacroix, and the many other works of Western art with which he had felt so familiar in China. In Amsterdam, he called in on his “old friends van Gogh and Rembrandt”; in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, he saw his revered Millet’s The Angelus and The Gleaners; he took photographs of himself with these two works, which served as teachers and guides when he was beginning to understand art, and as companion sages that enabled him to feel the world of the soul. However, for those early classical and modernist masters, Zhang Xiaogang could only express his long felt admiration and respect. During his three months in Europe, as one of the early Chinese artists of his generation in Europe, he focused more on contemporary art. During his travels he thought about the origins of Western contemporary art, considering the differences between Chinese and Western art and their respective background contexts, as well as how he should approach and create his own art against this background of obvious cultural differences. He also thought about what power could enable Chinese modern and contemporary art, which was completely different from that of the West, to become authentic human art that was not ancillary and, more importantly, not derivative. Of course, Zhang Xiaogang and his friends, finding themselves described as Chinese “underground painters” in the European context, could very clearly see stark differences between China and European (Western) countries: these were completely different worlds with two different backgrounds of civilization, different political systems, and different historical origins. Three weeks after he arrived in Kassel, he wrote to his fellow student Yang Qian away in the United States, telling him he now understood why Chinese art and European or Western art were so different. He noted that Western art has undergone a fundamental conceptual change: concepts, languages, marketing, and operational rules. He keenly felt how differences in cultural background had led to these differences in cultural objectives and standards, and how although artists in the world’s various regions and cities were creating art, the value and significance of their art differed because of different curatorial practices in different countries. This feeling and understanding made Zhang Xiaogang dramatically revise many of his concepts; he now further realized that different worlds had different art and he was now highly skeptical when the art scene began discussing issues related to what was regarded as “international art language”. He told Yang Qian:
At present, some people in China are becoming aware that removed from the special background of China, Chinese art is of no significance and has no value to speak of. Now that I have been abroad, I am even more convinced of this. Having seen Documenta lots of times, I think about the values of the people staging such a large-scale international exhibition and I now understand many things. Chinese [artists] have no need to feel aggrieved or ashamed; to tell the truth, apart from those who needed to accumulate large sums of money for large installation works [in Documenta], many works, especially easel paintings, are not worthy of respect – from Westerners, as well. What we are talking about is having a certain cultural background and, apart from that, many of the works are obscure. Maybe that’s the meaning of today’s art, right? Well, although I’m extremely lazy by habit, I seem to have written so much since I began this letter, pouring out my feelings, please forgive me. Although I have been abroad for three weeks, it feels like a lifetime; I understand a lot more and feel a lot more confident.[32]
In letters addressed to Li Xianting and his wife Liao Wen and to the critic Wang Lin and Ye Yongqing, Zhang Xiaogang expressed views similar to those in his letter to Yang Qian, noting differences in lifestyle, rules of behavior, and the social environment. He noted the differences in the goals and values of the lives and dreams of people from different countries, and naturally he also noted the differences in the starting points and objectives of artists from different countries, as well as those common criteria of judgment that he had found somewhat intangible in the past. He told his friends that whereas Chinese artists use the arts to contemplate life issues, what the Chinese call “the philosophy of life”, Westerners already regard art as an everyday consumer item. In a letter of 24 August to Wang Lin and Ye Yongqing, Zhang wrote:
Without the unique contemporary cultural background of China, which is one of the major representative nations with a highly unique context in the late 20th century, Chinese art and its artworks will have little significance and value. My feeling is that we should not adapt to a particular vision of “international standards”, but should adopt a “participatory mode” to develop a contemporary world culture jointly with Western culture and art. The prerequisite for participation is the need for China’s artists and critics to make continued efforts over a long period of time to be realistic and to have self-respect. This might sound too sweeping, but I feel completely confident that this is true.[33]
In Germany, a strong influence on Zhang Xiaogang was Anselm Kiefer. However, rather than saying that it was Kiefer’s heavy and strong artistic language that rocked him, it is better to say that it was more a case of the cultural background that this German artist’s work and artistic attitude exemplified that inspired Zhang Xiaogang. Zhang realized that the national and cultural background was important for Kiefer’s art, and his art clearly had unique connections with his traditions and life, otherwise, what was his art? Observing and contemplating Kiefer led Zhang to realize that he should paint what clearly belongs to Chinese painting. This realization led Zhang Xiaogang, after returning to China, to begin to observe seriously everything about China, especially how Chinese were different from Europeans.[34]
Many people suggested to Zhang Xiaogang that he remain in Europe, but in a letter to a friend in the United States he wrote:
I am preparing to return to China in October as planned and continue to live the life of an “underground painter”. My past, my emotional base, and my values are all located in that land. Although it’s poor, dirty, and frustrating, it is my destiny. This is what I deeply feel now that I am abroad.[35]
Three months is a very short time, but in letters written after July 1992, Zhang Xiaogang’s language and the spirit behind the language changed. He more often seemed to be observing an unfamiliar world that he needed to enter; he understood in which direction his own art should grow, but, having already formulated a concept for it, his art needed to express a more expansive space, and he wanted soon to exhibit in Europe or the United States, in those countries whose artists he so understood. Therefore, oblivious to living conditions or some imagined opportunity, and having already noted the living conditions of a number of Chinese artists living and working in Europe, he believed that was not what he wanted. He could see the existing inequality: “K18, Encountering the Others” was an event held concurrently with the Documenta, but even though participating artists from non-European countries also wanted to exhibit their works, K18 was far from ideal. Zhang felt that at this purportedly rival art fair conditions were poor, in comparison with Documenta. In a letter of 9 August 1992 to Li Xianting and his wife Liao Wen, Zhang Xiaogang wrote:
The main entrance of K18 is in stark contrast to the luxurious and aristocratic exhibition halls of Documenta. K18’s main halls are a rented yet abandoned warehouse on the campus of the University of Kassel, as well a rented exhibition hall in a small town half an hour’s drive from Kassel, so very few people can see the show. It is said that all those who attended the academic symposium on the first day of the exhibition were representatives from the third world. The largest group was from Taiwan and they were all sponsored by the government of Taiwan. Although artists from Japan and South Korea were also invited to exhibit, they refused to attend the opening ceremony, arguing that they had been “conned”. It’s a pity, because this exhibition was very interesting, but financially, curatorially, and display-wise there was no way it could compete with the scale of Documenta, and so it became a side show.[36]
At different art projects arising from different bases of power, capital, and standards, the presence of Chinese artists and critics over the next few years became commonplace, yet at this time Zhang Xiaogang was still swayed by habits of thinking derived from artistic essentialism. In China, during the process of transition from modern art to contemporary art, the new art phenomena, regardless of whether they were subject to the conceptualization of the former or latter, all faced the problem of artistic legitimacy, especially China’s modern art that still shouldered the pursuit of genuine humanism and human dignity, as well as being imbued with the vitality of the pursuit of the philosophy of life, at a time when contemporary art in Western nations had already entered the realm of the consumer. Zhang noted that in the West, the crucial issue was not artistic legitimacy or political confrontation, but rather concepts, techniques, marketing, and operational rules. These were two completely different contexts. While China’s market economy would quickly stimulate the process of artistic globalization, in this silent transitional period every Chinese artist could feel the pressure and confusion, but also seemed to discern the possibilities arising from the fragmentation of social life. Back in China, Zhang Xiaogang expended a lot of energy on writing a comprehensive introduction to the Kassel Documenta for the Jiangsu Art Monthly, which was serialized in the September, October, and November issues of the magazine in 1993. Zhang Xiaogang returned to China in mid-October 1992, at a time when the development of the economy was enticing social life out of its malaise and the art world was beginning to become active. Zhang and Tang Lei flew from Frankfurt to Hong Kong, and then passed through Shenzhen to Guangzhou. In Guangzhou, Zhang Xiaogang participated in the opening and awards ceremonies of the Guangzhou Biennale, officially titled “China Guangzhou • First 1990s Art Biennale (Painting Section)”, staged in the city’s Central Hotel. Following the critic Yin Shuangxi’s recommendation, the Chinese Artists’ Association in November 1992 issued an invitation to Zhang Xiaogang, to participate in the seminar in Beijing on “Trends in the Development of Chinese Oil Painting in the 1990s” under the auspices of the Association’s Oil Painting Committee. The head of the organizing group, Zhang Zuying sent a letter to Zhang Xiaogang, hoping that he could give an eyewitness introduction of the Kassel Documenta to the participants. At the same time, Zhang Xiaogang noted that the topics proposed for the seminar already touched on the question of the influence of the art market has on artists’ creative psychology and pursuits, at a time when allegedly outspoken marketing slogans at the Guangzhou Biennale, which has just ended, had been widely questioned.
Looking Back
As early as January 1992, readers of Jiangsu Art Monthly found a publicity flyer (fenggao) for the “China Guangzhou • First 1990s Art Biennale (Painting Section)” enclosed in that issue.[37] This event was to be fully funded privately, and so this “biennale” in its planning period attracted general suspicion for being an art venture linked to the “market” rather something organized by the Chinese Artists’ Association. The flyer invited artists from all over China to take part in the exhibition and informed readers that this exhibition jointly organized by private enterprises would invite art critics to form an Academic Accreditation Committee, in order to ensure the efficient conduct of the exhibition, and that the Organization Committee would also appoint a lawyer to act as the legal consultant for the exhibition. The flyer further stated that the Biennale Academic Committee hoped that, through this exhibition, Chinese companies would be induced to invest in the art field. In March, the critic Huang Zhuan, who taught at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts and was a member of the core preparatory team for the exhibition, prepared a written interview with the art director of the Biennale, Lü Peng, for publication in Jiangsu Art Monthly, so that art circles would be better informed about the upcoming Biennale. Huang Zhuan began by asking about the connection between the Guangzhou Biennale and FIAC (Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain), a question which Lü Peng fielded by explaining that the Guangzhou Biennale was more like an international contemporary art fair and those who wanted a “Biennale” in its purest sense were becoming “ridiculous”. [38] Lü Peng argued that these people mistakenly imagined the historically influential Venice Biennale to be a pure art exhibition, and that linking a market-oriented exhibition with a “biennale” was hardly tantamount to a violation of artistic integrity. At the end of September, the editors of Jiangsu Art Monthly included Lü Peng’s article “Heading to Market” (Zou xiang shichang) in their newly published issue. An editor’s note especially written to accompany the article expressed the hope that more people would participate in discussions concerning the relationship between art and the market and they highlighted the key statement in the article:
When there can be no divine judgment, the most effective final arbiter in the seemingly endless academic debates is money, which serves as the referee when art must be produced for sale.
Following the eventful 1989 exhibition of modern art in the China Art Gallery in Beijing, Zhang Xiaogang and his friends began to increasingly discuss market issues, but he and Mao Xuhui remained wary of the market. When he was in Kassel in August 1992, Zhang Xiaogang also discussed in correspondence with Li Xianting the possible impact of commerce on Chinese avant-garde art, but at the same time Zhang was clearly also aware that Chinese art required first-class international brokers; he provided a detailed, or as detailed as was possible for him, introduction to Chinese readers of Kassel Documenta revealing that he was aware that a new art system needed to be put in place. In fact, at the end of 1991, he already knew of the preparations for the Guangzhou Biennale; at that time, he went on to finish his Private Notebooks (Shouji) series and was painting works for the Guangzhou Biennale. Work on two paintings titled Genesis (Chuangshi pian), sometimes also called The Creation Story in English, began at the end of 1991 and was completed in the spring of 1992. This seemed to bring to a conclusion a creative phase that began at the end of 1989 and saw the creation of the Duplicated Spaces (Chongfu de kongjian), The Abyss (Shenyuan ji), and the Private Notebooks series. Work on the fifth painting in the Private Notebooks series began at the end of 1991 and the finishing touches were applied to it early in the following year, thus completing the bringing the series to a conclusion. Apart from a work in which we see a puppet-like human figure on a box that readily evokes the figural work of the Italian painter Chirico, the overall composition of the earlier works in the Private Notebooks series formed a complete entity: open rooms, wooden boxes, chairs, and windows possibly opening on to Hell invariably evoked the white bed sheets, amputated limbs, heads, and fingers suggesting the metaphors and symbolic meanings that characterized the period when Zhang Xiaogang was hospitalized. Zhang’s “interior monologue” that seemed like a philosophical interrogation had probably by this time left the artist exhausted, and Zhang Xiaogang seemed to realize that he should stop, given that he now seemed to confront two new major issues.
The first problem for Zhang Xiaogang related to subject matter, and whether it was possible for an endless interior monologue to touch on content that had never previously been broached. In Beijing, younger artists were painting scenes of bedroom life (Liu Xiaodong), the streets near Wangfujing (Wei Rong), and portraits of nonchalant friends or self-portraits (Fang Lijun); in Wuhan, if not painting combinations of “cultural revolution” icons and merchandising logos (Wang Guangyi), artists were endlessly replicating the national flag (Ren Jian), or simply painting mathematical addition, subtraction, and division symbols (Shu Qun). In fact, as far away as Hangzhou, Zhang Peili had already painted a number of indifferent Pop Art works, such as Chinese Bodybuilding 1989 Style (Zhongguo jianmei: 1989 nian de fengyun, 1989). For these painters, their themes were all a world away from metaphysical inner entanglements. In any case, the real, the insignificant, and the readily visible now seemed to form the subject matter and content of “leading edge” painting, while demonic, fantastic, and melancholy moods had also already disappeared from paintings in other cities without a trace.
The second issue for Zhang Xiaogang was that from the beginning he had exercised a high level of control over the freedom of use of the brush in his works, at odds with the vocabulary, revelatory nature, or narratives of Expressionism. This control simply stemmed from his desire to shape the profound and powerful atmosphere he hoped to create, and during the period when he was fascinated with emulating the work of Antoni Tàpies, he was not satisfied with simply using a mixture of latex and lithopone as the foundation for his paintings, but was using materials apart from canvas, such as cloth and paper, to provide his paintings with different texture. This readily gave his paintings the visual effect of thickness or depth, as well as mystique. In fact, Zhang Xiaogang’s inner being was so keen on the vocabulary of Expressionism because this vocabulary gave his interior monolog freedom of expression. However, he realized that he had to get rid of this spiritual inertia or what could be called the inertia of his means of expression, because he wanted to express more clearly and accurately his inner world, which was unlike that of any other artist.
In fact, Zhang had planned to make 1992 a year of rest and reflection; knowing that he would be going to Germany to visit Documenta, he wanted to stop painting temporarily, in order to have enough time to think and reflect on his past process of creation. He knew that the Guangzhou Biennale, with its fourteen-member Critical Review Committee, would be the largest exhibition of contemporary art in China since 1989. He obviously attached great importance to the exhibition, but in order to complete the works, he was pondering how to change his own artistic style. However, his psychologically habitual “interior monologue” prevented him from looking at everyday life; he seemed to be hoping to shift his gaze to the arena of history, but such a shift in theme was radically different from that of his earlier dreamscapes. He tried to move towards reality, but he felt that his present artistic reality could only be the logical result of his earlier reality. For Zhang Xiaogang, nothing could describe his present reality, apart from there being no apparent elements in his work to date that could point to the problem of his present reality. His work Genesis began with a questioning of today’s reality and history, and this would seem to be a change of theme, but this change soon led Zhang Xiaogang in a radically new direction: constructing the present day through the observation of memories filtered through amnesia.
Genesis was part of the Private Notebooks series and of course, a part or continuation of each previous series; when he was yet to discover a new and unique mode of personal expression, Zhang Xiaogang continued to use techniques and skills with which he already felt confident. Genesis can be divided into two groups on the basis of the photographs used in the works. In the first group of Genesis works, Zhang Xiaogang included photographs of persons of roughly the same age as the artist, mostly “educated youth” sent down to labor in the cities and in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, and he included photographs of himself in the countryside. He put commonplace and typical photographs from the official media together with photographs of himself and his friends, choosing to describe them as “our generation”, which prompted the following questions: Is this not a reality that warrants contemplation? Do the characters and stories in these photographs have no relationship with the present day? In 1990, when Zhang Xiaogang was making textured ground of canvas using copybooks and rubbings of inscriptions as printed ready-mades, his texts evoked ancient times for audiences, yet the themes of his new works included historical photographs depicting near contemporaries of the artist and iterating specific historical statements, readily enticing us into their reality. However, Zhang Xiaogang did not want to place this reality in the direct gaze of the viewer, because the artist was making reference to the memories of which these photographs are part. At the very center of the composition, Zhang Xiaogang placed the familiar wooden box; however, the space where the box is placed has lost its previous three-dimensional or even surreal qualities and it now tends to be flattened. The artist has retained the black door or window, strengthening the flattened quality of the compositions around the symmetrically placed rectangular windows containing text. At the top of the works a band of cloth with a black stripe above a red one bears down on the flat composition, perhaps serving as a symbol, the red being today’s reality and the black being some dark fantasy. Although the composition has this significant planar flattening, the overall effect is not intended to emulate the simplicity of Pop Art and to achieve a flat graphic look; in fact, the uneven and variegated rectangles of color give the composition a hint of the surreal and make it impossible for people to understand the image at first glance. Similarly, the infant on the timber box is a composite symbol: the origins of the self, our generation, and the nation today. Westerners might tend to associate the naked baby with the infant Christ, but the open book in the foreground is not The Bible; it is instead a symbol of history and its problems. A red hand points to the open book, continuing to hint at the artist’s persistent self-questioning; however, the photographs on the rear wall prompt questioning, which also begins with the artist’s “inner monologue” and extends to universal questions. In this work Zhang Xiaogang’s earlier use of yellow light is intended to reference Rembrandt at the center of the composition; this intense light emanating from an unknown source causes the complex expressive details to recede towards the back, so that the viewer’s gaze is focused, rather than allowed to roam. Genesis: Birth of a Republic #2 contains a selection of photographs of historical figures and historical sites of the Chinese Communist revolution: Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, and Dong Biwu, as well as photographs of Red Army soldiers, Yan’an and other revolutionary-era scenes. The composition is the same as that of Birth of a Republic #1, but flatter. The box in the middle foreground of the work is a chest of an antiquity commensurate with the characteristics of the revolutionary era to which the photographs belong; the symbolic meaning of the red infant is self-evident. Everything is a symbolic history, history as written by the Chinese Communist Party, the history of Zhang Xiaogang’s parents’ recounted revolutionary experience, and, ultimately, it is the basic context of what was called “the Republic”; the work is a concentrated microcosm of his parents’ early revolutionary experience and all the problems they encountered after 1949. However, the photographs used by the artist are not provided with any clear historical evaluation; the work simply enlists different means to inform the audience that the present day is associated with this history and the existence of the Communist Party; this is the reality. The artist uses no evaluative language, such as realistic reproduction or explanatory plot. Zhang Xiaogang relies only on the photographs in his works and thinly smeared with colored oil paint, as well as the totality of the composition, to construct a contemplative enquiry into existence, using his own mode of language to position blind spots. With only basic composition, handling of color, method of arrangement, and the use of the black and red banner to unify these two paintings as an entity, Zhang establishes the theme of “genesis”, with one work devoted to the past of “our generation” and the other to the past of his parents’ generation, these two versions of the past being closely linked. Whereas Pop Art hinted at Chinese questions through images of everyday aspects of life in China, Zhang was using historical images to create knowledge of contemporary images and the artist was extending the force of the ideas in these works to his audience. In fact, the tone of the works was gloomy or depressed, reflecting the basic attitude of the artist and obviously having no connection whatsoever with the requirements imposed on Chinese official art. The Genesis works were simply a full stop following his earlier creative work and the important thing was that this full stop provided the basis for Zhang Xiaogang’s later work. He said farewell to the nightmarish narratives in which he couched questions about life, and his gaze began to shift to the more specific history of his father’s, as well as his own, generation. When Zhang Xiaogang used the present to look back at the past and clear away problems, this had nothing to do with the “clean up of humanist enthusiasm” that Wang Guangyi had once advocated. Zhang Xiaogang knew what he wanted to confront, but he also knew that he needed time to achieve this. In fact, from the beginning of spring, he was preoccupied with the procedures for having a visa issued by the German authorities, complicated by the fact that the Chinese government insisted on first issuing an “exit visa” for each Chinese passport holder intending to go abroad. He wanted to go to Europe to attend lectures, hoping to meet with great masters to draw inspiration and encouragement from them in order to start a new page in his career. He certainly had enough ideas for all these preparations. After he returned to China in October he was in no hurry to paint, and he was making physiological and psychological adjustments; he needed to tidy up his ideas and experiment anew, even though the kernel of his experimental ideas had been planted before he returned from Europe.
Genesis won third prize, an award of excellence, at the Guangzhou Biennale. The documentary award (first prize) was won by Wang Guangyi and Li Luming. Indeed, the Pop Art that emerged in Wuhan in the spring of 1992 had much to do with the market; Pop Art and the combination of the market and political problems constituted an artistic language significantly different from the modernist trends of the 1980s. The fact that Wang Guangyi’s Great Criticism works were well received by the judging panel was related to that fact that critics were now casting their gaze towards new issues created by the market economy; the difference in artistic taste was secondary, because as the judges saw it, “In Great Criticism, the blatant juxtaposition of seemingly incongruous yet familiar historical images and current fashionable symbols, poses a tangled metaphysical question which is a contemporary problem revealed by the artist’s use of contemporary art language: what we call history is a linguistic revelation associated with contemporary life”. In comparison, Zhang Xiaogang also retained “an obviously symbolic and metaphorical essence”; simply put, he retained traces of metaphysics, which it seems did not much conform to the judges’ new taste, and compared with his complex juxtaposition of photographs, the Pop Art works seemed breezy and came with no spiritual burden. Most members of the judging committee were at this time very familiar with Derrida or post-structural theory, which is why a work like Genesis that seemed to bear all the traces of the 1980s only won third prize.
On 31 January 1993, “Post-89: New Art from China” opened in Hong Kong. This was the first collective exhibition of the important representatives of the new art of China staged outside the mainland and in June the exhibition went on to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.[39] The curators Chang Tsong-Zung (Johnson Chang) and Li Xianting divided the exhibited works into four categories according to concept and style, and Zhang Xiaogang’s work was placed in the category designated “Trauma of the Romantic Spirit”. Two other categories proposed by Li Xianting, “Political Pop” and “Ennui and Punk”, formed the main part of the exhibition, with “Political Pop” foremost, expressing the main strategy devised for the exhibition by the curators. In fact, the works in the “Political Pop” and “Ennui and Punk” (to be styled more familiarly as Cynical Realism) sections won unprecedented reaction from the media, and henceforth art in these two styles would spearhead the entry of Chinese contemporary art into important international exhibitions, and the Expressionist and Surrealist trends of the 1980s rapidly came to an end. As early as January 1992, Mao Xuhui wrote to Zhang Xiaogang, telling him that Chang Tsong-Zung and Li Xianting were organizing this exhibition in Hong Kong and some European and American cities. Because many Western art specialists examined and wrote about the exhibition, the show went on tour but the works were “bought up” for cash. This made Mao Xuhui cautiously excited that Chinese contemporary art was “getting an international feel”. With his trip to Europe upcoming, Zhang Xiaogang painted no new works, apart from Genesis completed for the Guangzhou Biennale. Most of Zhang Xiaogang’s paintings in the “Post-89 New Art from China” show were works completed in 1991 for the Private Notebooks series.
Zhang Xiaogang was not particularly excited by either the Guangzhou Biennale or Post-89, although he had met with these exhibitions’ eminent curators more than six months previously. Nevertheless, for Zhang Xiaogang the pressing personal issue was fulfilling his personal artistic vision. Unlike when he previously poured out his suffering and recalled his romantic and difficult past life, the complex reality of his dilemma of “memories” and “nostalgia” could not satisfy his emotional needs or provide him with spiritual consolation. For several months after returning home from Europe, Zhang Xiaogang did not touch a brush and immersed himself in reading and thinking. He felt dazed when he contemplated the richness of European culture from within China, where the objectives of art were becoming much more complicated and difficult to engage with. As always, he continued to discuss intellectual and artistic issues with his friends, but was aware that their “authentic and profound experiences of reality” continued to be greeted with suspicion and hostility from outsiders, and the longstanding harsh ideological controls and grindingly slow restrictions of habit that still stifled the spirit were only exacerbated by the hedonism and consumerism being spread by the burgeoning and ebullient market economy. In a letter to Mao Xuhui, he accordingly listed the phenomena of different countries, regions, and spaces that he “consumed” on a daily basis, arranging them from the famous to the nondescript, from failures to success, from warfare to sexual intercourse, from Diego Maradona to Amy Yip, from Michael Jackson’s skin to Mao Xuhui’s hair… He lamented the endless problems of social life, and the schizophrenic and weird atmosphere of social reality, and described how when he was listening to pop music he would find himself unconsciously drifting to the distant mountain village of Nuohei where they spent so much time together. Now is not an era in which to go looking for understanding or help from society, he argued; the market is a political tool that revises history, paralyzes people’s memories, and prevents political trickery; even in our own private worlds, we are roused from our dreams by reading only to find that life has changed - and not for the better. “The souls of humans float around, but cannot find a place to rest. What can we depend on?” Zhang asked himself, “We can only be sure that we are conscious and sentient crawling creatures living in specific realities”.[40] Although Zhang often seemed hesitant, confused, and despondent when talking with friends, his Genesis which he painted long before he travelled to Europe assertively demonstrated his new approach to his art. He clearly never stopped observing, discussing, and thinking, and gradually achieved clarity only after tossing things over and over again. In March 1993, a new decisiveness is evident in a letter he wrote to Mao Xuhui; regarding his realization that metaphysical theorizing characterized the 1980s, he commented that “today art has again returned to specific issues with cultural meaning rather than technical meaning”. He acknowledged that his inner calling of the past that simply caused him to acquiesce in emotional states, but now he should, as Beuys puts it, “on the basis of questioning and reflection, shape his own artistic language after repeated painful transformations, and with clarified and personalized spiritual guidance become a spiritual wanderer”. [41] In late June, in a letter to Chang Tsong-Zung, Zhang Xiaogang wrote:
I feel that this year will be transitional in my artistic career. This mainly refers to my use of concepts rather than my language style or the materials I use (I still prefer painting to other art forms). From an individual perspective, I’m constantly reflecting on issues related to time, life, art and culture. Rather than pursuing stylistic perfection as an ultimate goal, I’m making it my priority to interrogate the relationship between the life of the individual and the current reality. Perhaps this is why I am identified as an artist with an “interior monologue”. However, now I am more concerned about the relationship between individual lives and the changing times. I almost detest the excessive “humanist emotions” in my past paintings. It is difficult to express my ideas clearly in a letter. After I have completed a number of works, I will send photos of them to you. If you come to Chongqing, we can talk some more. [42]
At this time, the summer vacation was approaching, and Zhang soon wanted to return to Kunming to paint. From a text of this time we discover that Zhang Xiaogang was already gradually coming up with new ideas and he dimly felt that this was a possible experimental direction in which he could move and that now was the time to begin. In August, Zhang Xiaogang, having worked for some time in Mao Xuhui’s studio in Kunming, wrote to the critic Wang Lin in Chongqing:
Here I’ll talk simply about my current “artistic pursuits” (very difficult): I am hoping that through depicting public and private images and juxtaposing them, I can convey my feelings about the relationships in this era between individual lives and specific realities, to identify the points of alienation and the metamorphosis into an abnormal psychological state, including embarrassed ordinary people, ordinary families (both traditional and modern), and the paraphernalia of private life (such as wooden boxes, notebooks, etc.) in my works. These things arouse the most sensitive feelings I actually experience. In my grasp of language, I hope to be able to eliminate some of the excessively “humanist” emotional methods of treatment revealed in my works of the past, and augment the “strangeness” and “alienation” of the portrayed objects (through such techniques as the treatment of color and light). I will handle this “strangeness and alienation” on the basis of my feelings about the person’s psychological state. Maybe this can also be regarded as my understanding of “in-depth painting” – “depth” not merely having philosophical significance, but being also reflected in inner feelings acquired by the artist as a result of a profound experience and expressed as some “unique feeling” (what we call “artistic individuality”). I think this is an artist’s duty.[43]
The experiment which Zhang Xiaogang is here discussing was the earliest step of his new artistic phase. Once again, he talks about his dissatisfaction with “humanist emotions” and touches on his specific treatment designed to eliminate such “emotions”; the text also reveals that he may have been engaged in specific experiments to discard his earlier style of expression.
“In-depth” painting was a concept Wang Lin developed to describe the trends of “Political Pop” and “Cynical Realism” and the effects of the market on art,[44] after having defined these two influential trends in art:
The Post-89 art focused on social reality and life experience, which guided Political Pop and Cynical Realism. Political Pop feigned the serious utilization of Cultural Revolution icons to denigrate orthodox political myths, while Cynical Realism used scenes from the lives of smiling “punks” (hippies) to mock nihilistic constitutionalism, but Political Pop refrained from actually making any political statement within official criteria and appeared to be caught out in a sneaky quandary, while Cynical Realism appeared from the perspective of the criteria of the academy or officialdom to be the search for an escape from the standards of the general public and the demands of the market. Political Pop and Cynical Realism pointed to the basic psychological complex of the Maoist era, and their significance and limitations all stemmed from that.[45]
Although Wang Lin emphasized that the concept of “in-depth painting” came with a critical and intellectual position and that this concept was supported by a “combination of cultural criticism, social criticism and practical experience”, he nevertheless used a large amount of blurred terminology derived from modernist philosophy or essentialist theory in his interpretation of this concept, not realizing that much of this metaphysical vocabulary was no longer effective. Wang Lin made these points when he was preparing his exhibition titled The Chinese Experience, and from the second half of 1992 onwards he was working with participating artists and attempting to understand the possibilities of art in China after 1989. These discussions were ongoing prior to the exhibition and in the course of them Ye Yongqing pointed out: “I now feel that these references to ‘intellectuals’ and ‘independent spiritual orientation’ are excessive, because the existence of a consciousness of a social elite and of change in any discipline must be premised on the possession of an independent spirit, yet the ‘China experience’ we discuss is in fact a discussion of the friction between the Chinese avant-garde artistic spirit and real society......”[46] This rethink of art’s past and its relationship to concepts and language in transition was at the time quite widespread.[47]
“Big Family”
In the summer of 1993, Zhang returned to Kunming. After nearly a year of considered thought, he decided to begin experimenting with “eliminating” the “humanist emotions” from his works. In fact, the Expressionist “writerly” language mode popular since the mid-1980s was increasingly viewed as “modernist inertia” after the 1989 Exhibition of Modern Art, and it was characterized as being limited to Dionysian emotions and lacking rational transformation. Although Wang Guangyi proposed his mantra of “cleaning up humanist enthusiasm” in 1988, in 1987 there were already art phenomena completely different from the Expressionist tendencies in Southwestern art, although for a very long period Mao Xuhui and Zhang Xiaogang remained dismissive of such slogans and artistic viewpoints. Key terms of modernism and the philosophy of life continued to pepper their discussions of art, but as reality and his ideas about art changed, Zhang Xiaogang began to apply a different understanding to those artistic questions expressed using philosophical concepts. His European travels further influenced Zhang Xiaogang’s change in artistic language, and among his “audiences” with prominent European artists, Magritte’s calm and simplistic painting style that resulted in the creation of works with a mystical and mysterious atmosphere made a profound impression on Zhang Xiaogang; expressing inner conflict was not the same having to resort to calligraphy. In the text of his My Best Friend: Magritte (Wode zhiji: Magelite), Zhang Xiaogang described how he came to understand the painting style of this European artist.[48] When he was first learning to paint, Magritte expressed his confusion by writing “this is not a pipe” on a pipe. Initially, the “crazy” Van Gogh was Zhang Xiaogang’s deity, but in the 1980s, after seeing the Han Mo Collection in the National Art Museum of China, he revised his understanding of this Dutch painter. “Van Gogh had a really exceptional understanding of such things as how to layer colors and how to create a dominant theme across a canvas through the arrangement of lines”. Zhang Xiaogang believed he had misinterpreted what he had previously read in books.
Several years later, when Zhang went to the Netherlands and visited the Van Gogh Museum, he finally discovered that, unlike Van Gogh, he was not one of “those painters who must live on the edge”. Indeed, also on his first trip to Europe, when standing in front of an original work by Magritte, Zhang Xiaogang found this humorous artist “had reached the stage where he almost didn’t need to be able to paint because of the way he handled colors and shapes”. He further remarked of Magritte: “His plain and simple, yet subtle, language of painting reorganizes situations and objects from real life, placing them in a conjectured space and producing a sense of psychological dislocation and illusion. As a result a person enters a dream-like space of thinking through his paintings and then turns to confront the visual art’s spiritual pointers with their multiple meanings and multiple perspectives. After I marvel at all this, I am filled with esteem”. At this point, he understood why Magritte had written on the pipe, “this is not a pipe”. Zhang Xiaogang variously described the special qualities he perceived in Magritte’s art as “calm yet irrational”, “filled with fantasy yet maintaining due restraint”, and “terrifyingly real yet unfamiliar”. Life the Italian painter de Chirico, Magritte revealingly used the most ordinary and dispassionate way of viewing history and reality as though from a “distance”. In fact, Magritte’s deconstruction of objects, images, and words and the displacements in his “descriptions” influenced Zhang Xiaogang’s understanding of the relationship between painting and concepts so that Zhang could go on to disentangle the relationships between images, expression, and their intrinsic meanings, and agree to allow an image that has been modified to re-describe familiar, but in reality unfamiliar, things, objects, and history. Now, he could confidently use familiar techniques and methods to describe the “illusory realm” where he believed the soul could temporarily find shelter. Zhang Xiaogang began by first eliminating the Expressionist brush strokes from his portrait of his friend Mao Xuhui. He retained the deformed head of the original portrait to show that the new work was indeed a response to the mood of the earlier work, but he obviously gave the face and sweatshirt a graphic treatment and he used flat, unrelieved grey paint for the background of the portrait. Apart from using simple white strokes to outline the dark grey frame around the portrait and the dark grey floorboards, which could perhaps at a pinch be interpreted as Expressionist brushwork, all writerly or narratological techniques have been eliminated from the entire painting. The face appears to flinch to one side, which is an effect achieved by the distortion and in the light that appears to have not been expected by the subject; at the same time he uses no other Expressionist brush strokes to emphasize the twitching which is thus better described as a neurological characteristic of his protagonist. Unlike in his earlier portraits, the artist here allows the image, and not the brush strokes, do the talking. The artist attempts to discard Expressionist methods, even though earlier he was not too willing to have his techniques linked with excessively “writerly” painting. He now felt closer to Max Beckmann’s attitude: simply make the invisible visible, because this is the reality concealed within. Now, he intentionally, or unintentionally, adopted techniques of artists like Magritte or Balthus, evoking “strangeness” and “alienation” in the nonchalant and plain execution of the images. The spiritual world that Zhang Xiaogang hoped to express was unchanging and the task he now set himself was finding a new method, one that could accurately render visible what was “invisible” within his consciousness. Zhang Xiaogang completed a second work using the same technique which he called Portrait in Yellow (Huangse xiaoxiang), which was a portrait of his artist friend, Ye Yongqing. Although the light on the face in this portrait is yellow rather than red as in the first portrait, this painting by and large is a similarly conceived experiment; in the background the artist has placed a television set and a bed, and a thin crimson line runs from each ear of Ye Yongqing, one connecting to the television and one to the white bed. As a result of a childhood illness, Ye Yongqing has poor hearing and perhaps this is the meaning of the red lines Zhang Xiaogang has painted: sounds emanate from the sickbed and are then relayed to the public space. This painting completed the significant use of the straight black line that appeared in front of the tea-shirt in the first painting; later, light from no apparent source, red lines, and portraits with unspecified locations would soon become “fundamental elements” in the paintings Zhang Xiaogang would soon produce. In his earliest Mother and Son painting juxtaposed with photographs, Zhang still seems to have retained Expressionist positioning, though the faces are flat; Expressionist brush strokes also take up much space throughout the composition. In this painting the artist’s focus is on initiating a contemplation of history and the present state of his relationship with his mother. He uses an actual photograph of his mother at an early time in the “revolutionary era”, and between the son and the mother he places a letter he wrote to his mother. However, the portraits of mother and son seem to be merely juxtaposed, and the Expressionist framing is very obvious. In the later Bloodline series, the compositions of the portraits of the sons and parents apparently come from the artist’s childhood pictures, but the grey backgrounds that fill the compositions and the Expressionist floors are gone, leaving only the outer box framing the portraits.
As with the previous paintings, the artist has copied part of a musical score in the upper background and used compositionally subtle themes represented by the weather forecasting symbols for rain and sunshine. Here the artist is calmly objective and depicts everything about his characters in a leisurely way - their faces and lighting, their hair, their hats, their clothes, and the patterns of the cloth; thin red threads connect the parents and their sons, revealing their “blood” relationships. Yet, the individual features of the images of the characters remain in the detail of the artist’s depiction as does the clear delineation of the structures of their faces. At this time the artist has still not completely clarified what particular characters he wants to paint and how he wants to distinguish them from his earlier works. The use of red lines may have been influenced by Frida Kahlo’s use of an artery dripping blood into her subject’s lap as a metaphor of a broken heart, a result of the love lost between two individuals, but Zhang Xiaogang uses red lines as a symbol of unbroken connections or at least to express the hope that broken relationships will be repaired, so that he can better understand his relationship with the previous generation. At first, the symbolic function of the red lines clearly moves to the theme of “bloodlines”, rather than directly connecting to the relationship between the individual and the external world. In his painting Bloodlines: Mother and Son (Xueyuan: mu-zi), the artist shows his mother in her early years with her son who is already wearing glasses, in other words the relationship between the mother of the past and the son of today. The artist seems to want to transcend the linear concept of time, and place the mother’s concentrated gaze and her kin within a composite time. The image of the mother is near the photograph, while the self who is the son retains a fictive painterly quality, even though a red line connects mother and son. However, the spiritual connection between the two people exists by virtue of the fact that the two are both looking out from the painting, while the wooden chest in the background that symbolizes and indicates their personal experiences forms a complex background of history and reality, as does the television set transmitting an image of Tiananmen Square. Zhang will use the wooden boxes and the sheet music of songs he has read as leitmotifs for many years; these objects personally used by the artist constitute a private memory and serve as a pointer to things of the past, while the public memory in these paintings, encapsulated by the image of Tiananmen, we should see as Zhang Xiaogang’s constant deliberations in his linguistic experiments. At this time, Political Pop was popular, and images of history and reality like that of Tiananmen were appropriated and developed in Political Pop art; Zhang Xiaogang seems to have also adopted Tiananmen as a politically symbolic element, although he was more concerned with other historical elements, namely the origins of his parents’ political bloodlines. In these compositions Zhang continued to use Expressionist strokes and texturing, demonstrating that in the process of his experiments in artistic language he was not totally willing to discard vocabulary with which he was very familiar. Red Baby (Hong ying) is the most obvious example of the mental tossing and turning the artist’s experimental process entailed, and even in the portraits he painted in 1993 he continued to use latex and lithofen for the texture of the faces of his subjects, as in Girl (Nühai) and Transsexual (Bianxingzhe). In the work finally completed in this year titled Bloodlines: The Big Family’s Happiness #2 (Xueyuan: Da jiating quan jia fu 2 hao), he specially used yellow spots to highlight texture, but he completely eliminated even the tiny strokes of paint on the characters and their clothing, and depicted the family in a manner much closer to the way in which families posed in old family photographs. At this time, apart from the expressionistic frame that enclosed this works and which was about to be discarded by the artist, his classic works known as the Big Family series were now on the horizon. He describes this moment in a letter:
After I had seen for myself all the European masters from history I liked I decided to abandon Expressionism, because I had only two choices: I had always combined Surrealism and Expressionism and always wanted to combine Surrealist and Expressionist things but after I combined them I realized I had to give up one or the other. Making this decision was fairly difficult, because I still liked things I could feel, and surrealist things seemed more rational.
After I returned to China in 1993, I painted Tiananmen Square in a residually Expressionist manner and I completely wanted to retain brush strokes with an Expressionist effect in order to suppress the emotional stuff, but it was still very hard and this kind of expression itself revealed my emotions.[49]
This memory confirms that in the summer of 1993 Zhang Xiaogang was beginning to confront an actual dilemma. He admitted that his expressionist brush strokes sprang from force of habit which he was somewhat reluctant to shake off; however, leafing through old photographs at home evoked memories and demanded that he make a choice in technique and methods. He could not return to his emotional writerly style, which he had to totally renounce. In his back-and-forth experiments, in the spring of 1994 he finally abandoned his Expressionist habits, but encountered problems that were even more complicated, evoking the dilemma of K in one of Zhang Xiaogang’s most revered texts, Kafka’s The Castle:
It was late evening when K arrived. The village lay deep in snow. Nothing could be seen of the castle’s hill, it was wrapped in fog and darkness, not a glimmer of light hinted at the presence of the great castle, nothing at all. K stood for a long while on the wooden bridge that led from the main road to the village, gazing up into the seeming emptiness.[50]
Kafka’s protagonist did not finally succeed in getting into the “castle”, and K was prevented from entering the castle by every problem and difficulty he encountered, confronted and suffered, even though he was just outside the castle. Zhang Xiaogang loved Kafka’s art and he was moved by the complexity created by this Czech writer who grew up as a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: Kafka did not proclaim his inner contradictions, but his sense of social worthlessness and his perception of meaninglessness led him to abandon any simple attitude and technique of narrative with clear intentions, and he turned instead to writing an inner story with multiple meanings, no clear borders, veracity of detail, and overall absurdity.
Indeed, even when Zhang Xiaogang was still working on his Private Notebooks series in 1991, he found his artistic intentions being increasingly influenced by language. In his Private Notebooks series, we can still easily identify his early sentimental and nostalgic thinking and how it was being changed by the intrusion of nightmares and fantasy. After his spirit had been destroyed and his spirit and understanding of the world were beginning to recover, his rift with his father, the monotony of life, and the lack of basic cultural knowledge that surrounded him made it easier for Zhang Xiaogang to pursue what he felt to be most honest and pristine. This was a type of nostalgia, commonly experienced among those whose wishes are thwarted, who do not lead an ideal life, and who oppose their inner feelings, but who nevertheless feel insignificant; they always hope to find some different form of comfort that will solve their problems. As a result, this sense of nostalgia that searches for comfort was readily regarded as the first human pure symbol – for the grasslands and the people on it – that could provide satisfaction. This is why at an early age Zhang Xiaogang often told his friends: his feeling that he was mentally stifled and restless could all be dispelled on the grasslands, where he could find simple and profound emotions. “Awakening”, “sincerity”, and “love” became words he frequently used at this time. The feeling engendered by “returning to the countryside” accorded with the spiritual climate of that era: the ideals symbolized by the red Young Pioneer scarf had disappeared, yet the patriarchal pressure with its revolutionary background continued to exist. His mother’s love had always influenced him and this love alone, in its powerless and twisted way, enabled Zhang Xiaogang to feel the security and warmth that were otherwise so difficult to attain. Thus, at the beginning, it was only in the historical narratives painted by Gao Xiaohua and Cheng Conglin that Zhang Xiaogang could see a history that seemed to approximate reality, in the theme of purity in the paintings of his classmate Yang Qian that he felt empathy, and in the sentimental images of He Duoling that he could appreciate the inner sensitivity of his contemporaries. He made no appeals to collective ideology, in the way the painters producing Scar Art. He was motivated by an inner need for consolation; he had also never lived a life of traditional meaning, and so he was wary of a simplistic and irrational “return to the countryside” or “return home” that could be tantamount to a return to nationalism. This was why Zhang Xiaogang from time to time would caution himself not to succumb to the features of genre amorous feelings (fengqing), best understood as a concept encompassing genre painting and the vernacular life-stream style. At that time the phenomenon of “vernacular painting” (xiangtu huihua) was a fashion and Zhang Xiaogang’s work was sometimes lumped into this category, but Zhang Xiaogang did not want to paint works that were either excessively local or nationalistic, which did not form part of his psychological needs. Zhang Xiaogang’s experience and background of knowledge, especially after he entered the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 1978, led him easily to toss the task of simple psychological repair to one side; his love of Millet’s approach and mood derived from the sense of inner purity and religious feeling Millet provided; Zhang borrowed from Van Gogh’s style of brushwork, because in the art of this “deity” he felt he was able to get away from simply reproducing reality, and as far as his impulses and desires were concerned, his trembling brushwork and gloomy colors could accurately express the true complexity of his inner desires as well as his joys and concerns. From the very beginning Zhang Xiaogang never wanted to paint enchanting sunlit subjects. Put simply, for Zhang Xiaogang reading Western literature and Western culture provided a human and transcendental memory of returning home that did not cater to parochial or nationalistic neediness.
Zhang Xiaogang was melancholy and sentimental by nature, and this seems to have determined aspects of his future artistic and spiritual identity: melancholy, homesickness, nostalgia; his art in its different periods could never shake off his psychological particularity or ethos. Eventually, it was this ethos and the resulting artistic practices that led Zhang Xiaogang to construct a unique and ambiguous “psychological castle” that felt different or even absurd, and the monumentality of this “castle” compelled people to agree to use words like “amnesia” and “memory” to analyze its contours.
“Amnesia” is a medical term used by a doctor to describe a patient’s symptoms, but, according to the logic of psychoanalysis, “forgetting” implies that what is forgotten had a reality that previously existed in time and space, but the patient is now completely unaware of it. For Zhang Xiaogang, what really existed? This was a key question. When he was pursuing and interrogating his own desires and needs, what are those objects that never reveal their form? His need for alcohol derived from his quest for knowledge and his need to feel empathy. This is a basic explanation of his early lifestyle in Kunming, but those objects that exist in unconsciousness or the subconscious are intangible. When the hospital, disease, and death became tangible elements that directly stimulated his brain, these elements and knowledge generated uniquely derived images in his study of art, like the ghosts or demons created from the white hospital bed linen.
“Amnesia” nourished by knowledge and regulated by rationality began in his aesthetic production of fantasy. These dreams were always like fragmentary or truncated episodes that presented the artist’s memories, as well as modified, tampered with, or even fabricated memories, like the most seemingly veracious details in Kafka’s writing that somehow also lack any connections to any overarching reality. It is safe to say that the artist did not want to make these connections because such links could easily weave a strong cloth curtain that might conceal the truth and obscure the absurdity behind the reality. Those amputated limbs and heads, the doors symbolizing the dark night, the parents’ chairs that so readily suggest control, and the books and poems that bring history to mind are all memories fabricated by the artist from his earlier real life and are all reminiscences that have been distorted and dismembered by the artist’s feelings. Forgotten Dreams is a series of works that are the result of the calmative effects of real joy and relaxed moods on the artist’s imagination, and this being the case, in his dreams he also combines and integrates memories of the times he returned to the countryside and fragments of historical and philosophical ideas; in those dreams we see overlapping histories and slow time (la longue durée). However we regard this, Zhang Xiaogang always retained traces of memories but, through a filter of nostalgia like that of Baudelaire, Zhang Xiaogang’s contempt for reality increased, or at least, he maintained an attitude of avoiding the tackiness of reality. He placed his dream location adjacent to an idyllic place, but simply added to it his pursuit of questions of life and death, scattering his questions through images, symbols, and material props.
The political and social reality after 1989 severely rocked Zhang Xiaogang, and he could no longer look at his earlier poetic symbols and images; he decided to use animal heads to express his inner terror. At that time, the handwritten notes, the wooden boxes, the cloth banners and the indoor objects, all of which function as memories, are now scattered in different spaces colored grey; these pictures readily suggest the Ghosts series to audiences, leading them into the web of mythic history that he has spun. In a letter of October 1990 he mentioned Max Beckmann’s art, and wrote: “Cabbalistic mysticism and Chinese Zen both tap into this vein of thought. It is particularly worth citing de Chirico and Magritte; the long shadows of melancholy and mystery on de Chirico’s dark streets splits time and space in two, and there the ancient buildings and statues and the vaguely outlined figures make people feel in fright the powerful force of the real power within”.[51] However, in order to construct the real world of within, Zhang Xiaogang did not achieve this by using techniques for building or simulating time and space; he only valued what was “within”, and in this way he could freely re-use his earlier compositions, by enlarging a section of them, for example, or by making the torso or the head more prominent. At this time, in the completeness and richness of his handling of works, how could all the images originally altered by his imagination be completely denied and emptied out? The actual dimensions of the works influenced this question and, at the same time, because the transformation of the historical imagination and reality was entirely based on Expressionism, rather than any three-dimensional spatial method, viewers were led towards an emotional catharsis.
After the exhibition of the United States artist Rauschenberg in the China Art Gallery (today’s NAMOC) at the end of 1985, for a short time Tàpies’ use of collages and real objects became a technique used by Zhang Xiaogang to strengthen the heavy feel and strength of works, and so, in 1991, it was natural for Zhang Xiaogang to include those historical photographs in the historical environments he created, perhaps better described as the artist including in these works his memories and modified memories. This method was an escape from pure brushwork, or even from painting, and flat space became the real space subject; the picture became the platform on which “objects” were placed. However, Genesis remained an expressionist work even though the artist used smooth strokes to erase the many barbed strokes in the images, especially the baby at the center of the composition. The physical photograph itself also possibly removed traces of expressionism, but the composition still reminds us of the influence of Anselm Kiefer and Tàpies.
However, as Zhang Xiaogang began moving in the direction of using all resources drawn from his imagining and remembering of his own past, former times, or history, he only required that images of persons - often in fact portraits of himself – be at the center of his compositions. He would then contemplate, gaze at, judge, and organize the history he wanted to recover; discarded things were regarded as forgotten and if required, he would amputate his own limbs, position them in different places, causing people to be alarmed, to question, to conjecture, and to imagine, until eventually they could converge on the theme he wished to specify. Old photographs were an important resource, and when the artist focused again on old photographs sealed up in an album, he discovered utterly new possibilities because he readily found that he could find among the resources and themes removed from the techniques of Expressionism in the old photographs which resources would provide him with a complete basis for looking for, understanding, and “re-producing” history, and for searching for the core of memory that cannot be eradicated from integral human nature.
In the 1993 summer vacation, after Zhang Xiaogang returned to Kunming, he began to ferret out and utilize old photographs of his parents exactingly and in their entirety without any misgivings and, in using them, Zhang initiated a process that took him from the gradually accumulated “memories” of the Grasslands series, through to the “forgotten” (yiwang) of the Private Notebooks series, which provided rich opportunities for the artist to recover his individuality; those old photographs rich in memories could satisfy the artist’s aim to draw close to his target, from any perspective. It was also in 1993 that Zhang Xiaogang read the Chinese translation of Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being which resonated with him in a particular way; the complexities of human nature in the context of socialism presented in the book touched a chord in Zhang Xiaogang. At the same time, the dual influence of politics on amnesia and memory drew him closer to socialist history – not to mention that the story took place during the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Zhang Xiaogang at this time had come to realize that philosophy invariably came with specific living relationships and situations, otherwise, as Kundera put it, “philosophy is conducted with no people and no situations”. Zhang Xiaogang’s reading of Kundera enhanced his understanding of issues regarding the philosophy of life, and he was clearly aware of the need to quit “the other shore”; like Tomáš in Kundera’s novel, if there was no specific compulsion, there would be no final choice. Zhang Xiaogang increasingly hoped to become more real, and so at that time he could not imagine “the other shore”, and preferred to the view that “the heaviest burden must at the same time also become the influence with the most powerful life force. The heavier the burden, the closer our life is to the Earth and the more real it is”. In this way, he made his goal to the observation of history or the past and their inseparable links with the present.
Zhang Xiaogang established his artistic goals: he transformed his themes from abstract philosophical questions to the analysis of images expressing historical problems, and this new approach meant that he was no longer skeptical about the images and symbols he used. His mother in the photographs is an historical image, and he hoped to rely on his own observation and expression to reproduce history as he understood it; this was an aesthetic of nostalgia, but, unlike simple restorative nostalgia, the artist did not want to return to the past, but simply to observe and analyze the past, and analyze his mother in those revolutionary years. Yet he knew that era had gone, never to return and, more importantly, one could only observe it again with the eyes of the present day. This meant that the past which occasions nostalgia is not the truth and is only the reason for today. This type of analytical “memory” from the very beginning does not expect to be “recovered” or “reproduced”; such memories are possibly not real and are only a “memory” repaired through critique and evaluated after a loss of memory. Having adopted such a position, the use of a photograph in an artwork provides space for expression, and in Zhang Xiaogang’s experimental thinking, such a critical stance on a historical issue gradually came to constitute the body or entity of the work. As a result, the portrait of the person at the center of the composition could not be a photograph, because the distortions and the use of light and color Zhang brought to the true likeness rendered the originally estranged character even stranger and this heightened strangeness resisted judgment regarding the accuracy of the character’s image, at the same time as it also retained his earlier expressionist techniques that required a strange and mysterious atmosphere which would transform cherished memories of the “revolutionary years” memory into a restricted doubt. Audiences want to be close to the objects in the paintings, but the compositions are imbued with an atmosphere that prevents them getting any closer. Therefore, this historical aesthetic provided an open possibility, rather than a certainty that must be necessarily verified if one were to return home to stay. In the early 1980s, French poets and writers provided Zhang Xiaogang with the nostalgia and sentimentality of “le mal du siècle”, but this mood and attitude drawn from European literary and philosophical sensibilities had no basis in China; the mood engendered by “le mal du siècle” was appealing, and this was why Zhang Xiaogang and his friends were constantly recalling their reasons for living on the banks of the “Seine” in their “Left Bank lodgings”; however, this Bohemian style could not replace the special context of feelings, and the destructiveness of this doctrine of decadence could not repair the inner trauma of a young man living in a foreign country far from home; unless he could invent more effective methods, this invention would necessarily entail constant pain in its pursuit. So, in his new experiments, Zhang Xiaogang retained homesickness, nostalgia, melancholy, and even dejection, all in their usual sense, because he was hostile to, and distrusted, reality, but the artist also instilled understanding and analysis in his works and proposed questions about his uncertainties. Zhang Xiaogang’s use of red lines connecting his characters or figures, as well as characters and objects, and use of patches of light from an indeterminate source were invariably aesthetic ways of inspiring people to reflect and ask questions. In fact, Zhang Xiaogang did not want to return to any Holy Land of the revolution, preferring to return with friends to Guishan and Xishuangbanna to inspire his nostalgic imagination; he cared about and relied on his mother, but he used his mother to repair his psychological dilemma after his “amnesia”. Indeed, in the early years, the pathological signs of nostalgia that can be “hearing voices” and seeing terrifying or friendly “ghosts”, phenomena that can readily be discovered in poetry and literature, were effectively converted in the art of Zhang Xiaogang into healing artistic images. He felt satisfied and was happy to be subject to these inner torments. This was an issue most effectively examined through artistic images and a psychological malady allowing the artist to willingly want to enter and enjoy treating the self through analysis and acting out. So, based on his recognition of the self-healing purposes of art, Zhang Xiaogang brought along the melancholy that he had never rejected, because the aesthetic attitude evoked by melancholy invariably tied “amnesia” and “memory” together, and under the influence of the integration of his grey, cold tones and indescribable expression, the melancholy very naturally brought out his inner conflicts regarding thought and feelings, spirituality and reality, and the soul and the flesh; at this time, monistic and dualistic theories of life and death had lost their meaning, and states of the soul finally dominated his work. We can clearly feel how the artist has retained melancholy in his “Tiananmen” works of 1993: if symbols close to those of political pop influenced the character of his “melancholy”, the artist could seriously abandon such symbols because he was always conscious of preserving images that evoked historical moods -- only those characters could hint at historical melancholy.
In experiments that began in the summer of 1993, Zhang Xiaogang used household and personal effects to express the “sighs” of melancholy. Even though the artist at a very early date placed these tools [instruments, agents] in his works, those works structured them as positive elements in the entire picture, because they are part of the expressionist drama the artist has arranged and play a role in this drama. Yet in his new experiments, the boxes, television sets, and other objects are like discards that can only appear after they are recalled. Therefore, these items large and small are only the instrument of last resort for an artist searching for spirituality, because they confirm “what is past”. This is a drift in values and a loss of symbols; what relationship with reality do the preservation and insistence on the individual have? If they have historical value, why today does it appear to have no weight? If they have no value, why is the artist unable to reject them? These items exist in the painting as a type of descriptive “tone of voice” and they are only a symbol of the artist’s personal identity, but they construct an overall entity that emotionally matches the early melancholy.
The castle, its outlines already beginning to dissolve, lay quietly as ever. K had yet to see the least sign of life there, maybe it was impossible to make out anything at all from this distance, but they eyes kept wanting to see, they refused to accept the stillness. Looking at the castle, K felt at times as if he was watching a person who was sitting there quietly, staring straight ahead, not so much lost in thought and hence cut off from everything as free and unconcerned; as if the person had been alone, with no one watching him; he must be aware that he was being watched, but it did not affect his calm in the least and in fact – there was not telling whether this was cause or effect – the watcher’s gaze found no purchase and kept sliding away. The impression was reinforced today by the early dusk, the longer K looked, the less he could make out, the deeper everything sank into semi-darkness.
This is the beginning of the second paragraph of the eighth chapter of The Castle, yet K is no closer to his goal of entering the adjacent castle, having moved between hotels, inns, schools, and the rest of the village with the intention of securing entry. Kafka filled his story with the humblest, simplest and poorest characters and incidents, and so it has been interpreted to show that in the most ordinary life one can discover honest assistance and religious significance. Zhang Xiaogang’s work titled Genesis #2 is a grand narrative of remembrance, but Zhang Xiaogang does not allow his work to fall into the easy trap of the grand narrative of Political Pop, because he chose an ordinary family, casting his own parents and the four brothers as ordinary and viewing them moreover as the most common and most ordinary family. In the experiment which began in 1993 he described and observed such families, and his work Mother and Three Brothers (Muqin yu san xiongdi) placed the protagonists in a particular historical period, but here we can see a problem: when the three sons had grown up and participated in social and political activities, the artist still retained the memory of his mother as she was in her youth. Obviously, “memory” has been modified, and the artist puts side by side the image of his mother in her early revolutionary years and a youthful image of her, albeit of the period after the “cultural revolution”, strengthening the analogy and contrast between the early revolutionary years and the later political reality. This is a question confronted in the arrangements in other works of the same period: What is the factuality and objectivity of shifting changes in spiritual life and daily life? If people lacking ultimate concerns are associated with revolutionary and radical symbols, can they attain an affirmation of personal salvation in their constant beliefs? Do the ideals and politics of different periods and political ideals have anything inherent in common? For these questions that have no answers, the images of people remain uniform, but they have somewhat looser clothing and their facial coloring is strange, unfamiliar, and needs explanation. Zhang Xiaogang has used surrealistic colors and the badges of leaders they wear on their jackets are not authentic - the actual color of the badges forms a contrast to the lips of his characters; the artist has arranged books and what might be extended in the background to either side of his characters, which decisively extends the imaginary space for the audience to view, as though the artist had only produced a scene from history. This post-“amnesiac” memory is consistent with the characteristics of “nostalgia”, and so if the imagined objects are real, then this imagination has in fact created new memories.
Modernist literature and art has dualistic historical and realistic descriptions, and so when writers and artists use ancient or even earlier stories to represent reality, they are recounting the landscape of history and are observing the past through the eyes of today, but they are bringing reality to the past, and making visual the relics of history for people to criticize. Zhang Xiaogang has just started a new kind of history painting. The story depicted in the work took place in the past, and when he put his own image or an image of today into the work, he was making the past in the painting even more distant; this was completely different from putting something from the past in the present, and the artist’s unconscious intention in relying of such a view of history was to voice his dissatisfaction with the present, and calling into question his real experiences in this life. What is the meaning of “amnesia”? What exactly has the self lost regarding memories of events that have already happened in the past? “Reality” and “objectivity” are two words that are difficult to use, because the historical images created by altering and restructuring photographs barely withstand physical examination; in addition, what is the relationship between “internal” truth and history?
PART THREE
What traces of thought does “memory” represent, even if it is the dust of history? This is the logic of history painting divorced from essentialism, whereby the temporal relationships between “amnesia” and “memory” are many: “amnesia” itself may resist time, in that the artist basically cannot find a reality that of itself does not exist, he does not concern himself with the things that are lost, but only retains the past with which he is familiar and which he loves, retaining the items he used and the face of the mother he knows; at the same time, the artist also cannot believe that he has found the things he wants to recall, just because he has depicted historical uniforms and clothing, and requires that the parts that he can still remember were never lost and, in this, the moods of history (fixed in each old photograph) have existed until the present, as serious, timid, controlling, and suffering. Regardless, of course, of who the subjects are, the era in these old photographs is consistent and unified. Their possible richness and diversity should be understood as having no significance or no consequence. Obviously, “amnesia” and “memory” are already separated from the logic of general pathology and have acquired a spiritual meaning for an artist insistent on skepticism and rationality.
Even if there are modifications and imagined interventions, those traces of history garnered from experience still have the features and nature that can be judged by others. Thus, the images of uniforms, army caps, badges depicting leaders, and even of characters bring with them unshakeable traces of past ideology. Unlike an artist producing Political Pop works which modify the historical state ideology and which juxtapose the symbols that represent that ideology and symbols that completely contradict that ideology (these often being capitalist marketing logos), such Wang Guangyi’s Great Criticism series, Zhang Xiaogang had to quietly delineate the typical indicators of state ideology, under the assumption that these insignia would seem to have been left intact or were the result of restored memory. Zhang Xiaogang was obviously familiar with the connotations of the state ideology of the past, given that they still existed to the present day in a different form. What did Zhang Xiaogang anticipate? Surely there was no one who believed that the artist was singing the praises of distant revolutionary history, and so what did he want to record of his parents’ history? Hadn’t the heritage of those revolutionary periods created the artist’s present day, regardless of whether the artist was willing or unwilling to acknowledge the fact? The images served to verify history, but how the images verified, symbolized, or expressed history was not knowledge whose boundaries could be delineated. However, the symbolism of the image in a physiological sense always remained as “memories” in people’s minds, and as soon as they emerged, people could tightly link the content of these memories to their general experience, and this could result in conflicts between the memories of the audience and the memories of the artist arising from the differences in the evaluation systems of the audience and of the artist. After December 1978, on the basis of changes in society and ideology in the course of economic development, people to varying degrees began to modify their historical criteria, modify their opinions on everything that had happened, and even modify their ideological positions. Such changes in “criteria”, “opinions”, and “positions” blurred the entity of state ideology; only when people were faced with a single historical narrative were differences are inevitable. However, Zhang Xiaogang not only did not concern himself with the possibility that audiences judged his work differently from what he intended, but quietly presented his images of history. To a great extent, the artist did not try to elicit his own general evaluation, and his expression seemed to be limited to the imitation of photographs; he also attempted to render his subjects as photographs, as for example in Lover (Airen, 1994), but we can see the following in several Bloodline works of 1993. Zhang Xiaogang was gradually juxtaposing different photographs according to his own ideas and, depending on his focus of concern, we can discover relationships between characters that have been dislocated, images that have been modified, their historical props that have been arbitrary positioned, like the books and the dagger in Mother and Three Brothers, and the spaces in which the characters are placed is conjectural, in a way that is different from the conjectural settings people are familiar with from photographic studios. All of this was part of a forceful assessment of state ideology seen through the artist’s mind and eye and as much as he tried to conceal his subconscious thought and even as much as he was able to not entertain any particular assessment of history, the artist brought his own feelings and visual judgment to bear on his restored images of “memory” and his recovered understanding of the concept of time. Yet, the first spring breezes of enlightened thinking influenced Zhang Xiaogang when he became a student at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, and he began to immerse himself psychologically as a young man in the close relationship he maintained with his mother and the conflict that kept him distant from his father, and on the pure and simple grasslands he felt he had passed through a spiritual baptism that brought him back home. Soon, through Nietzsche he became aware of another symbolic meaning of the flock: he knew that flocks of goats eat grass, gambol about, and rest, and he also knew that the only thing lacking for them was the human ability to generate melancholy; from Hesse he became aware of his own identity and fate; and, from Baudelaire he acquired critical metaphors for the defiled nature of reality. In all, it was through Western works of literature and art that he discovered his real identity and the spiritual means of “salvation”, discarded his romantic and circular soliloquy ushered in by “self”, understood another basis for understanding the “self”, and discovered that the experiences of himself and his parents were not simply personal relationships and blood relationships, nor simply matriarchal or patriarchal, but were relationships of history and politics. The intimate combination of the revolutionary history of his parents as early Communist Party members and China’s national history, as well as his experience strongly influenced by state ideology, not only constituted part of his parents’ personal history, but also constituted part of the artist’s personal history. There were many times when historical factors passed on from his parents could even penetrate his own blood so that it was difficult to say how the artist evaluated his parents’ past political experience, even if the moods of the characters in his paintings did not meet the expectations of state ideology and even denigrated or doubted it. These complex blood relationships, the background of knowledge, and historical experiences were gradually transformed and refined in the crucible of Zhang Xiaogang’s senses and feelings into a spiritual world that could only be discovered once he had emerged from overall considerations about “amnesia” and “memory”.
In December 1978, after China won a measure of intellectual freedom, the energy released in the country made it possible for everyone to describe the changes of the times as “progressive”. The young people influenced by Western enlightened thought often used the perspective of modernism as a weapon for demanding change that chimed with the time of liberated thinking. However, the essentialism inherent in modernism readily engendered a passion for innovation or led to oblivion. When rapid changes in the market economy, or the economic reforms described as the “commodity economy” in the 1980s in China, began to bring changes to social life, the problems that were ushered in by the essentialism of progress were concealed by the increase of material wealth, even though this concealment was deliberately inherent within state ideology. People cheered on the material victories, overlooking the psychological loss and moral decay; writers such as Baudelaire had observed similar social phenomena and railed against them in their writings. Thus, escaping from the triumph of progress is a task of memory, which wanted to bring artists back the original issues, at the same time as not denying the inevitability of social change. The crux of the matter was: What was the past? And what is required of us that we can maintain it and not allow it to be interrupted? For our artist, such questions triggered changes in methods and a new beginning of the narrative. Zhang Xiaogang, unlike artists producing Political Pop who were influenced by the symbols ushered in by the market economy, did not directly express what he could see or the quotidian objects that he could touch; he almost instinctively resisted these things at close range. Now, unlike in the 1980s, he was not returning to a world of dreams or an abstracted world of phantoms, but withdrawing to the family who had once been familiar and required consideration once more. There is nothing that can be more problematic than exploring one’s family’s history and experiences. Like those artists who proclaim that they must change their artistic concepts, Zhang Xiaogang’s selections from history were personal judgments and conjecture, even though he used photographs as the basis of his works. However, he meticulously and obviously modified people’s habitual judgments. He re-described the reality of his own family; he used images that readily evoke particular scenes in order to divert the viewer’s line of sight and deployed aesthetic taste to coax people into a fresh awareness of history. The artist used grey and monotone color to echo people’s habits of visualizing and assessing “past” times; he used faces with no expression and a near uniformity so that audience could be aware of the historical commonality and general spiritual state shared by people in the past; he used thin red lines to disrupt people’s judgments regarding the authenticity of the space in the picture; he used unexpected flecks of light in order to maintain contact with the indescribable fibrillation emanating from his earlier dreamscapes or hells.
In 1993, when Zhang Xiao had just completed the major steps in creating his Big Family (Da jiating) series, there was only one Expressionist frame waiting to be finally abandoned in the new year. Only when we compare the portrait of three persons he completed earlier in this year with the finally completed picture of the parents and and son are we able to see that the artist was already very clear about his new attitude. In the earlier picture, the artist is still unwilling to remove the traces of earlier brushstrokes, especially on the faces and the areas where light falls in the picture where clear structures are retained; the eyes and facial features are delineated with a careful hand developed over many years, and the numbered musical notation in the background and the weather report symbols give the nod to Pop Art. In the last work completed in that year, the picture is extremely “clean”, the styling and features of the characters now appear typical, the unique features of characters’ facial features are now toned down, no traces of brushstrokes appear on the clothing, the visual effect is closer to photographs, and the execution of the entire painting is smooth without any jarring sections; yet at the forefront he has retained the atmosphere of panic and doom evoked by his various expressionistic series. Now, the “flecks of light” have been redefined and they little resemble light but rather the floaters that occasionally appear in one’s vision. When the Post-89: New Art from China show toured the United Kingdom, his work titled Bloodlines: Mother and Son from his Big Family series was being exhibited in London’s Marlborough Gallery, and in December, he included some of his new experimental works in the exhibition titled Chinese Art in the Nineties: The China Experience, curated by Wang Lin and held in the Sichuan Art Museum.
From 1994 onwards, “the expressionistic frame” does not appear in any of his works, signaling that Zhang Xiaogang very clearly affirms his method of expression and aesthetic attitudes. In July, when he completed the fourth painting in his Big Family series of works for the 22nd São Paulo Biennial in Brazil, he gave his new works the name Blood Lines: Big Family. This meant that he was beginning to provide more profound and richer answers to the issues of the “extended family” that has “bloodlines” as the starting point. In the composition of Two Comrades (Liangge tongzhi), in which the two characters look almost the same, the artist is obviously quite clear that he wants to retain and highlight the shared historical characteristics, depicting an historical unitary that requires presentation and to do so he has decided to abandon component any traits of personality and individuality. In July 1994, he wrote in a letter to Li Xianting and Liao Wen, Li Xianting’s wife:
Since I returned to Chongqing this year, I’ve been busy. Apart from classes, I spend all my time holed up in my studio. Now I’m not painting in the way I painted before when I was surrounded by an atmosphere of “humanist enthusiasm”; now, once I decide on my concepts, I spend more time on how to actually apply paint to specific parts of the canvas. I feel better this year, and have more or less given up all entertainment and I’m drinking less...
… This year, my idea is to make my works more monotone, more artificial, and more neutral. I basically retain the inspiration from old photos for basic patterns and effects of expression. Some feelings seem to take me back to the past. The language of easel painting has now “run its course” and the only thing in play are graphic elements like techniques of imagery and description. I don’t know why, but I always feel removed from the language of installation art. Revolutions in that style seem to have been perfected in the West. Chinese people have endured so much and have so many stories that all this cannot be satisfied by playing with forms. My current situation might have something to do with my age and where I come from, which is why I have more of a “historical complex”.[52]
In 1994 the Big Family works began to move further in the direction of categorization and abstraction: from Portrait with Gray Background (You huise Beijing de xiaoxiang), we can see that his character’s bloodline identity has been weakened, and the artist has made his works more monotone, artificial, and neutral to weaken his character’s personality and diminish the apparent characteristics of his lines of descent. The four paintings Zhang Xiaogang entered in the Sao Paulo Biennial enable us to see very clearly the artist’s deliberate approach to categorization: he has removed the physiological features of bloodlines, such as age, and the artist can thereby also remove the features shared by “parents” and “‘sons”, so that his characters become all-inclusive and archetypical “Chinese”; it is enough that the red armbands of his young characters evoke Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution, because they are not remembered in that year as siblings, but rather as a summarized social identity. Thus, those “blood” relationships represented by red lines are gone, and political and ideological background becomes what they have in common; the army caps are no longer historical relics in the photographs of the parents, but the imitation and transplantation of a peculiar historical and ideological context.
Zhang Xiaogang bluntly admitted that he had to tell stories, so he was not at all afraid to discard what he felt to be unsuitable in his unconsciously profound expressionist narrative, his present task being to extend the concept of the “family” to become a more extensive historical concept. In other words, the images in his works must have a universal symbolism and generality. In this way, the concept of the “family” transcended blood ties to extend towards society and more complex territory. He later wrote:
It was not my own family that led me to the intuitive painting Big Family, but my unit, the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in Huangjueping, Chongqing. After I read Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, I was inspired and felt that my unit was like a big family. The nation itself is like a very big family, managed in the family style. We all work and live together: after class we become resident neighbors and in class we have teacher-student relationships and relationship between colleagues. You want such a relationship, which ramifies in all directions and is very complicated. We live together, work together, eat together, and play together; we do everything together, and over a long period time this leads to a lot of trouble. The experience of living in such a family unit is particularly common. Why did I set my painting of the big family in 1994? Because in 1992 I had gone abroad and was comparing things with the free world in the West, and when I returned to our school, I was suddenly clear about things and about what sort of environment you are living in; you can’t do without it, but you can’t stand it. This includes my own family. Gradually I discovered how deep-rooted the concept of family is for the Chinese.[53]
Comparing this to his response to reading Marquez’s novel in the 1980s, we can see that Zhang Xiaogang felt differently about the novel then. In the 1980s, for Zhang Xiaogang the concept of the living white sheets and his pantheistic conviction that “everything has spirit” complemented each other, but ten years later, the same novel inspires in a completely different way; the novel itself has not changed, but the perspective of the painter has. Now Zhang Xiaogang has been directly baptized in Western society, and is beginning to understand the major differences between China and the West, and these sentiments become the gene that gives rise to his new art creation.
On 28 July, his daughter, Huanhuan was born, and the simultaneous birth of his daughter and Big Family was highly significant. Perhaps the birth of a new life urged him to paint the commemorative work titled Bloodlines: Comrades and Infant (Xueyuan: Tongzhi yu ying’er). The baby in the picture can be understood as Huanhuan, but the images of two completely identical males resist the general meaning of family. Despite the fact that the theme of “comrades” readily evokes the concept of gayness, Zhang Xiaogang is in fact attempting an experiment to paint two people as one, as in “cloning”, so that individuality and differences are completely erased, to fully express a “neutral aesthetic view”; this resulted in the differences between male and female characters being erased in some works so that we are simply left with the concept of a “person” or a “Chinese”. This is standard form or template in the Big Family series. In fact, in an experiment of 1993, the basic form of the Big Family has emerged, and its symbols and metaphors only need to cast off the “expressionistic frame” for the Big Family to extend indefinitely. He is now at the last stage in deploying all perceptions and methods to complete the Big Family style, by incorporating the traditional “calendar” portrait style with which Chinese people are very familiar and Magritte’s plain painting methods into his own painting methods. In fact, in the explanatory notes for the Chinese exhibition titled Sleepless Nights and Weightless Moments at the 22nd Sao Paulo Biennial in 1994, its curator Chang Tsong-Zung pointed out that Zhang Xiaogang’s paintings made use of “early Republican techniques of portraiture”. Later, the critic Li Xianting wrote in an article titled “The Contemporary Chinese Master of Miniaturization Zhang Xiaogang and His Miniature Portraits of Chinese People” (Zhongguo dangdai yishu de suoying-shi yishujia Zhang Xiaogang he tade suoying-shi Zhongguoren de xiaoxiang. 1998) provided a fuller description of the history of this technique, writing how Zhang Xiaogang “in the Big Family works used a smooth and seamless technique revealing no brush strokes to soften the modeling of his characters” and how “this technique and aesthetic approach used in popular Chinese secular portraiture originated in the late Qing and early Republican period, especially in the portraiture used in calendars used for commercial advertising”. Today, the aesthetic approach and results deriving from this source we now recognize left the critic Wang Lin distressed that Zhang Xiaogang’s work in The China Experience exhibition Wang curated was devoid of the passionate “expressionistic” feel and the elements of “critique” in the original Big Family paintings. Indeed, he asserted, Zhang Xiaogang even used the techniques and that approach to modeling that one sees in fine curbside sketching, and his techniques of using both graphite powder and water colors are identical to the methods employed by the artists who churned out old-style calendar portraits: clean, popular, and somewhat satirical. Zhang later explained:
In 1993, when I first started painting Big Happy Family (Quanjia fu), I was prompted by, and based, my work on old photographs. I can’t explain how those old photographs, after they were elaborately embellished, actually touched a deep nerve in me and they made me think I could never put them down. After a time, I gradually realized that what moved me in the standardized Big Happy Family, apart from the historical settings, was their stereotypical “modified feel”. This encompassed the peculiar aesthetic consciousness of enduring Chinese popular culture, apparent in such elements as the blurred individuality and the neutral aesthetic feel imbued with a “poetic sense”. In addition, the family belonged to a category of private symbols, yet was at the same time standardized and ideologized. We live in fact in a large, extended family, and within this “family”‘, we must learn how to control every form of kinship or bloodline relationship - familial, social, and cultural. Within this genetic consanguinity, the concept of “collectivism” is actually deeply embedded in our consciousness, forming a particular complex that is difficult to discard.[54]
In using the old photographs, all memories and past experiences surfaced. Zhang Xiaogang may not have read the history of the Communist movement, but was able to modify and erase tangible ideals from the remaining fragments and traces gleaned from: textbooks from different periods, the national propaganda machine, episodes from his parents’ experiences, the Southwest Bureau, the Yunnan Provincial Communist Party, the streets and alleys, the Soviet painting textbooks and albums, his teachers, his fellow students, and any other available source of information. He obviously also supplemented his knowledge of Chinese history with what he gleaned from the writings of authors in other socialist countries. From the novels of Milan Kundera, for example, he could feel the harshness of ideology and the humanity of the revolutionary pastoral, as well as the political nature of memory and the multiple meanings of amnesia; confronting the national political environment and social life gradually established in China from 1949 onwards, people were enlisted and integrated into history to much cheering and passion. However, his parents’ political suffering and the peculiar and indescribable family atmosphere that resulted took shape in this political and social environment. Basic blood relationships and the parental love and familiarity conditioned and penetrated by political reality were always premised on conformity to the legitimization of state ideology and could never be simply judged, given the distortion and pain that they manifested the conflicts this gave rise to. When a Big Family work of 1995 was entered in the show in Hamburg titled Emerging from State Ideology: China’s New Art, the red scarf served simply as an historical symbol, one covering all ideological labels, and this consistency exemplified a unity of historical memory and reality. Anyway, from 1949 onwards the Chinese people lived in a basic political system and environment characterized by unified thought, will, action, and command. Traditional social and family concepts were also transformed by the Communist revolution into ethical forms that would maintain this environment: emulating Communist martyrs, maintaining a steadfast political position, and distinguishing clearly between and who and what one must hate and who and what one must love. People would required to be selfless, self-sacrificing, and to do everything for the sake of others, and they were called upon to love the Communist red scarf, to heed the teachings of their leaders, and be worthy successors of the revolution. Zhang Xiaogang had been taught: “The Cultural Revolution period has bequeathed us only one thing, which is Mao Zedong thought. The Cultural Revolution raged for a full decade in China, leaving the human consciousness and spirit a desert. Artists must create their work in this situation”. This was an area in which the supreme leader controlled everything, and “the supreme directive” overrode all work units and all families in which people live, and even penetrated the recesses of the human soul. Indeed, individual desires never existed, and only society was permitted to share in a common ideal; individual talent was always welcome, but people were required simply to accept that they must serve the nation’s needs; because it commanded the people’s political thinking, only the ideological criteria of the Party and State could legitimize the same expression, he same clothing, and the same colors of life. The yellow or red flecks of light in the Big Family works appeared unconsciously, simply as roundabout symbols of inner discomfort or discontent that could at any time burst out as desire, but these unconscious flecks were also effectively controlled; they often appeared in portraits in the vicinity of the eyes, and were simply an aesthetic modification of the artist’s earlier Expressionist vocabulary, as a sacrifice of expressionistic” aesthetic modes, because in the subconscious they must be subject to memory’s control of the basic fact of historical unity and conformity. Similarity, the red lines in the works that relate characters are the purest symbol of the artist’s chaotic thoughts, and are “memories” recovered after “amnesia”. All these elements together constitute Big Family; this family is so large that it not only encompasses the artist’s self, but all people who understand China’s history and reality find it hard to deny that it has symbolic meaning as the history and reality of China’s society. This, the “memories” recovered or created by the artist regulate the schema and forms of Big Family, and to a large extent, while the generalized “aesthetics consistency” cannot express the “historical uniformity” of China, the style of the artist’s rendering enables us to see a replication of China’s historical “monotony”, “repetition”, and “total uniformity”, and these aesthetics principles were what early modernism sought to avoid.
When the artist had completely discarded his “expressionistic frames”, he became completely aware of how opposed Big Family stood in relation to the “avant-garde”; he had felt that by simply following his own inner needs he would succeed in realizing his own unique transitional language. He told Li Xianting that he no longer regarded himself as an “avant-garde artist”, having “discovered that whether or not one was ‘avant-garde’ was not determined by the artist; on the contrary, if an artist simply went in pursuit of the so-called ‘avant-garde’, it was often easy to lose oneself”.[55] This is a real transformation in the artist’s ideas, and what set him apart from the surrealist path in Political Pop and Cynical Realism was that in Zhang Xiaogang’s historical images we find the diversity and complexity of postmodernism; setting out from an assumed hypothetical history, resulting from amnesia and memory, he retained as much as possible blind spots he could explain and utilize, and his free and full sense of history led people through his imagery to conjecture, identify, analyze, and judge history and the humanity in history.[56]
In January 1995, a year before Zhang Xiaogang was able to provide a final summation of his work, he wrote:
The elements of the composition of recent works, apart from the complex psychology conferred on us by history and reality, had their direct inspirational source in the family’s private collection of old photos and the charcoal sketches you can see on street-side stalls in China. I have no way of explaining how those carefully modified old photos touched a nerve in me and they would send thoughts flashing through my mind, so that I couldn’t put them down. Perhaps because we live in today’s era, these old photographs no longer simply provide the satisfaction of nostalgia.
… … The old photos and charcoal sketches are like a schematic language, embodying what I am so familiar with as well as things I would once have instantly dismissed, and these include a uniquely satisfying aesthetic elements once pursued by ordinary people in China, such as blurred individuality and an emphasis on commonality, reserve, and neutrality and satisfying the aesthetic features of poetry. Of course, as an artist living in the age life, I cannot discard the influence on me of my education in art history and aspects of modern civilization such as philosophy and psychology. So, in a sense, I am in fact creating works that have the effect of “false photographs”, being history that has already been “modified” and life that has been even further “modified” or “re-modified”. In this process of “re-modification”, the “painterly effects” with which people are familiar, such as the handling of color and brushstrokes, I consciously reduced to the minimum, leaving only a blurry history and life, and every soul tenaciously struggling under the general standardization appears with a face that appears calm but concerns an inner complex and passes on from generation to generation ambiguous and obscure life in this age of contradictions.[57]
In 1995, Zhang Xiaogang continued to develop variant of his Big Family schema, and through individual and group portraits he extended his understanding of history and the past. In July he entered three works from the Big Family series in the 46th Venice Biennale, and this was the first time Zhang Xiaogang had exhibited any work from the Big Family series in an international exhibition; later he included three works in an exhibition in Arts Santa Mònica in Barcelona titled Fifteen Years of China Avant-garde Art. He took the opportunity in this city of visiting Tàpies who had been so influential on him, and although he was now following his own artistic direction and had completely farewelled the interesting experiments Tàpies had inspired. In Madrid he visited the Prado and saw the works by El Greco that he had previously only seen in photograph. This visit underscored the love of this Spanish artist Zhang Xiaogang long felt, but also signified that, even while Zhang used completely different methods to complete his Big Family works, his moods and colors still retained a relationship with El Greco. He went on to participate in the exhibition in Hamburg titled Emerging from State Ideology: China’s New Art organized by the International Avant-Garde Cultural Centre of Hamburg State, and in an exhibition of China’s New Art in the Vancouver Art Gallery Zhang Xiaogang exhibited works from the Big Family series.
In 1996, Zhang Xiaogang’s Big Family works were included in the Bonn Contemporary Art Museum’s exhibition China!, and Zhang attended a symposium organized by Germany’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and China’s Cultural Affairs Bureau. Zhang Xiaogang was also beginning to be invited to do interviews with major European television stations and newspapers. Later, Zhang Xiaogang’s Big Family works appeared in various exhibitions of Chinese contemporary art in major international cities, including New York, Paris, Edinburgh, and Brisbane. In September of that year, The New York Times ran a review of a Chinese contemporary art exhibition by Alan Riding titled Chinese Artists Exalt Their Recent Past, the introduction of which stated:
Zhang Xiaogang, a 38-year-old painter working in Chongqing, has focused on the legacy of collectivism through a series of photograph-like portraits called Bloodline and Comrades. In these, the subjects stare out of the canvas conveying no visible emotion, yet each has a stain on his or her face suggesting an inner wound. “The first lesson we have to learn is to protect ourselves and keep our experiences locked up in an inner chamber away from the prying of others”, Mr.Zhang explained in a note in the catalogue.
The “Mr.Zhang” mentioned by Alan Riding was the show’s curator Chang Tsong-Zung (Johnson Chang). Because of his participation in the “Post-89: New Art from China” exhibition of 1992 and his dealings with the curator Chang Tsong-Zung, Zhang Xiaogang signed a contract in 1993 with Chang Tsong-Zung’s Hong Kong Hanart gallery. In September 1994, Zhang Xiaogang described in a letter to Chang Tsong-Zung how he was exhausted from years of running around, and now that he had a daughter, “all his thoughts revolved around his daughter’s future”. He and his wife “wanted to set up house in Chengdu”, and needed to buy a house there that was large enough to use a section of it as a studio. He urged Johnson to help him by extending him, as his brother, an advance of USD30,000, if he was able to. In 1995, Zhang Xiaogang did paint a work titled Big Happy Family for Chang Tsong-Zung that somewhat resembled a portrait of the recipient.[58] In 1996, Zhang Xiaogang, his wife, and daughter moved into a new house in Chengdu that he bought with the money from Johnson. He lived there until the summer of 1999, when he and Tang Lei divorced and he moved to Beijing. Yet Zhang Xiaogang would always regard that house in Chengdu – at Number 5, Shaziyan East Lane, in Chengdu’s Yulin District – as a home where he could shelter.
NOTE:
[1] In a letter Zhang Xiaogang vividly described how mice patronized their bedroom in the college dormitory:
One day when we came back from the city, there were four or five mice conducting a meeting on your dormitory bed. They had got hold of Fu’s (Ye Yongqing’s wife) money and had brought it out to examine, scattering it everywhere. They had also pushed her new work, a sculpture, to the ground, and turned it into the smashed Venus painted by Hu Langren’s (Zhang Xiaogang’s friend, Hu Xiaogang), which was truly horrible.
Ref: Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Ye Yongqing (11 November 1986)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, p.92.
[2] Many years later, Zhang recalled how in his early years (1988), he was profoundly moved by a Japanese female student at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts who was buying a painting from him:
Seeing how focused she was, we were afraid to interrupt her by speaking. She stared at the painting for a long time, then looked at me, smiled and said, “I have a 100 yuan foreign exchange certificates, can I buy the painting with that?” Of course! I was in desperate straits at the time, because I had decided to go to Chengdu and get married, but I didn’t even have a three-figure sum to my name. At that time this amount in FECs would fetch approximately RMB 200 yuan. After she paid me, she stood in front of a pile of paintings and made no move to leave. She was lost in thought for a moment then asked me: “I still have 200 yuan, can you sell me another painting?” So I felt a great sense of accomplishment that day, having sold two works for RMB 400 yuan! On the following day I asked Ye Shuai to accompany me and the money to the railway station so that I could take the train to Chengdu to get married.
For Zhang Xiaogang, this was “the first collector I ever knew”. (WeChat message of 3 November, 2015)
[3] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Mao Xuhui to Zhang Xiaogang (16 October 1990)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, p.156.
[4] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Mao Xuhui (3 October 1990)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, p.155.
[5] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Mao Xuhui (3 October 1990)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, pp.155-156.
[6] Ye Yongqing, Time Traveler: Essays by Ye Yongqing (Shijjian de chuanxingzhe: Ye Yongqing wenji), China Youth Publishing House, 2010, p.72.
[7] Art and Market, Issue 1, Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, 1991.
[8] Wang Guangyi, “On Cleaning up Humanist Enthusiasm” (Guanyu “Qingli renwen reqing”), Jiangsu Art Monthly, 1990: 10, pp.17-18.
[9] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Lü Peng (18 October 1990)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, pp.158-160.
[10] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Lü Peng to Zhang Xiaogang (20 November 1990)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, pp.161-162.
[11] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Mao Xuhui (4 December 1990)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, p.169.
[12] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Yang Qian (January 1991)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, pp.175-176.
[13] Lü Peng, Yi Dan, The History of Modern Art in China:1979-1989 (Zhongguo xiandai yishu shi: 1979-1989), Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, 1992, pp346-348.
[14] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Mao Xuhui (7 November 1990)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, p.165.
[15] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Mao Xuhui, 7 November 1990)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, pp.165-167.
[16] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Mao Xuhui (15 April 1990)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, pp.153-154.
[17] Lü Peng, History of Contemporary Art in China:1990-1999 (Zhongguo dangdai yishu shi: 1990-1999), Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, 2000, p.78.
[18] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Li Xianting (12 March 1991)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, p.180.
[19] After 1989, Ye Yongqing also soon felt that his art language must be changed. In a photograph of him taken in December 1991, we see that Ye Yongqing has already painted his earliest work revealing new art concepts and artistic language in transition. In September of the following year in a letter to the critic Lu Hong, he wrote: “I think that the current Political Pop phenomenon in the country is a sign that Chinese contemporary art is entering a mature stage, and some of these works and the artists’ ideas touch on the critical questions in contemporary Chinese culture ... ...” (Quoted from Ye Yongqing, Time Traveler: Essays by Ye Yongqing, China Youth Publishing House, 2010, p.151.)
However, he voiced his complaints and concerns in a letter to Zhang Xiaogang, who was travelling in Europe:
Valuable words for you and me like “spirit”, “faith”, and “dignity” are now regarded as being “passé” in the current critical discourse. What is now current are fashionable terms such as “in” (shangke), “out” (xiake), “get a kick and die” (guo bayin jiu si) [title of a novel by Wang Shuo], and the like. Is “operations” another term that is all the rage at the moment? Learning from the practices of Leo Castelli, will China be able to produce the same set of brilliant results? Such “operations” propelled de Kooning’s naked female torsos onto the stage of history in the 1950s, prompted sales of Rauschenberg’s beer bottles in the 1960s, and enabled de Kooning to go back home to painting and listen to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. (p.153)
Ye Yongqing was responding to news coming from Guangzhou, and at that time, the preparatory committee for the Guangzhou Biennale, comprising the critics Lü Peng, Huang Zhuan, Shao Hong, and Yang Xiaoyan were passionately involved in editing Art and Market. Lü Peng’s concept of “operations” was widely questioned, and people generally did not understand the concept of “art heading to the market place”.
[20] I.e., transferring from Kunming to Chongqing to work as a teacher at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts.
[21] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Zhou Chunya (26 April 1986)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, p.79.
[22] Yang Qian’s grandfather and grandmother went to the United States in 1949. His father in China also had a very good background in English, which gave Yang Qian an excellent advantage. After 1978, when China began to open to the outside world, Yang Qian had a good background for fully preparing to study abroad. In 1982, after graduation from school, with help and support from his family, Yang Qian matriculated in 1984 for the MA program in the University of Florida’s College of Art.
[23] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Yang Qian (6 October 1989)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, pp.138-140.
[24] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Yang Qian (11 November 1986)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, p.140.
[25] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Mao Xuhui (18 December 1989)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, pp.144-145. Zhang Xiaogang’s reference in this letter to people eating “buns soaked in human blood” is a reference to a traditional Chinese medical belief which proclaimed the healing properties of eating a mantou (steamed bun) soaked in the blood of an executed criminal. The writer Lu Xun felt that this practice epitomized the “cannibalistic” exploitation of China’s feudal system, and in his story Yao (Medicine) written in 1919 described a family’s desperate attempt to cure their consumptive son with a steamed bread bun soaked in the blood of an executed criminal.Here Zhang Xiaogang uses the allusion metaphorically to hint at the cruelty of the suppression of the students in the Tiananmen Square by the government and to castigate those who might also be described as having “cashed in on Tiananmen”.
[26] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Mao Xuhui (12 May 1991)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, p.182.
[27] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letters from Mao Xuhui and wife to Zhang Xiaogang (20 May 1991)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, pp.183-184.
[28] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letters from Mao Xuhui and wife to Zhang Xiaogang (20 May 1991)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, p.184.
Xiao Jin (Liu Xiaojin) was Mao Xuhui second wife, and Niuniu was Liu Xiaojin’s daughter from her first marriage. Mao Xuhui and his first wife also had a daughter, called Maotou.
[29] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Mao Xuhui (8 July 1992)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, pp.199-200.
[30] “Underground painter” or “underground artist” was a concept that impinged on politics, ideology, and values that was used in China from 1979 onwards. It indicated those artists whose art and artistic ideas were not acknowledged by the official government art organizations; their art was subject to official proscription, could not be exhibited in public galleries, and was not accorded legitimacy. This situation changed with the development of the market economy; beginning with the 1992 Guangzhou Biennale and the 1993 Post-89: New Art from China, Chinese unofficial art supported by the market acquired the opportunity to be exhibited and marketed, and began to make an impact on a global scale. With the 2000 Shanghai Biennale, which accommodated the works of these artists, it seemed to some critics that this signaled that “underground artists” had finally emerged from the underground to above-ground legitimacy. Later, at the First Guangzhou Triennial of Contemporary Art (from November 2002 to January 2003) the curator, art historian Wu Hung also stressed that the exhibition was not an “underground” event. Yet, in fact, for some “underground artists” such an opportunity was only temporary. The National Art Museum of China in Beijing, as the representative of state ideology, was unlikely to extend to those “contemporary artists” who were called “underground artists” the possibility of either being exhibited or collected. The main significance of the 1st Guangzhou Triennial of Contemporary Art was strengthen and promote the legitimization of Chinese contemporary art through the discipline of art history, through academic activities, and through research, even though some members of the triennial’s art committee were official artists and even officials, who were “cooperating” under completely different artistic criteria with supporters of contemporary art. Needless to say, the word “underground artist” gradually disappeared in the new century, but this did not means that their art in China had acquired full legitimacy; apart from the nation’s major state galleries and art institutions which still excluded important contemporary artists and their art, the most substantive of reason for this was that the art of these artists embodied values and position that officialdom ultimately found difficult to recognize.
[31] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Mao Xuhui (8 July 1992)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, pp.199-200.
[32] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Yang Qian (5 August 1992)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, p.202.
Yang Qian in a letter agreed with Zhang Xiaogang’s opinion:
You’ve just arrived in Germany, and you first impressions of the West are correct. Western art has developed to the present in the way it has for very sound reasons, but it is difficult to understand if we subtract it from its cultural background.
……
Thinking of myself, now that I have been abroad for eight years, I’ve fallen behind regarding all the changes that have taken place in China. We have been abandoned by the national culture, at the time as we are not accepted as immigrant artists in white circles. This awkward situation is cause for thought. Of course, time is a factor. But when we came to the Unite States we were not young. We were already subject to dual cultural influences, and this alone gave us potential hope. We are Chinese-Americans, but we are also neither American nor Chinese, and these people caught in the middle really don’t know what to do!
The situation in China now seems fine, so going back home is a smart move. It seems that while you cannot say the entire army was “routed”, most people can either do nothing or change their jobs. Here, life is a big problem. After you become a master, you receive many invitations, otherwise you must travel everywhere at your own expense.
Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Yang Qian to Zhang Xiaogang (20 August 1992)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, p.204.
[33] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Wang Lin and Ye Yongqing (24 August 1992)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, p.213.
[34] In 2011, he reminisced about this time:
In 1993, I seriously saw for the first time what the Chinese face looked like, and I realized that the portrayal of characters in traditional Chinese painting is very realistic, They used to think that for Western oil painting depictions of Chinese people were not real, but now that idea has changed. I am clearly aware that about this point: a person should travel the road that relates to his life, his education, and his nation, and not relate to abstract things. In art there have never been abstract things, and art has always grown up among specific visual patterns, and only when it attains a certain height can it have relations with art of the same stature, and become something that they call culture. (Unpublished recording)
[35] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to H.Y. (10 September 1992)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, p.215.
[36] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Li Xianting and Liao Wen (9 August 1992)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, p.209.
[37] The original English of the exhibition was “The First 1990s’ Biennial Art Fair Guangzhou, China”. The use of the term “art fair” was a political strategy used by the curators, and was used to signal that the event was limited to the market and did not involve the sensitive concept of “modern art”. In this way they could avoid official scrutiny that might raise suspicions that this fuzzy notion of a “biennale” could be construed as propagating “bourgeois ideology”, whereas “art fair” conveyed the idea that the curators saw the intention and function of the event as encouraging the market. In August the 27 winning entries at the Biennale would be acquired as “futures” (sight unseen) by Shenzhen Donghui Enterprise Limited for a total sum of RMB1million yuan, designed to create huge media effect. On 27 August 1992 Guangzhou’s Yangcheng Evening News had as the headline of its leading story: “Budding Art Market in China: A New Consciousness of Business Investment in Art Collection, Shenzhen Company Makes Million Yuan Oil Painting Deal”.
[38] What is interesting is that in its first issue of 1992, the editors had published an article by Hou Hanru who had left China for France in 1990 that was titled “FIAC'91 and Belgian Contemporary Art”. Hou Hanru became an international curator, and for quite a long period of time, he focused on academic issues in the arts, and did not show the slightest interest in the market. Even in introducing a purely market-oriented trade fair, he focused on the “solid strength” of Belgian contemporary art rather than the Exposition Gallery’s sales figures.
[39] Titled “Mao Goes Pop: Post-89 Chinese New Art”.
[40] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Mao Xuhui (1 June 1993)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, p.223.
[41] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Mao Xuhui, Mao’s Wife and Ye Yongqing (11 March 1993)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, p.220-221. At this time Zhang Xiaogang was circulating Beuys’ biography his circle of friends.
[42] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Chang Tsong-Zung [Johnson Chang] (22 June 1993)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, p.224.
[43] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Wang Lin (21 August 1993)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, p.227.
[44] Wang Lin published in Jiangsu Art Monthly (1994:2) his article titled “On In-depth Painting” (Lun shendu huihua), in which he wrote:
Addressing New Wave art’s cultural criticism of distancing in traditional art, post-1989 art focused on cutting, socially biting real and personal experience, and this led to unusual realist painting apart from Political Pop and the New Generation. It should be noted that, under the influence of market deconstruction (a negation of spiritual values and an emphasis on cultural efficacy and market manipulation), there were a number of unhealthy trends:
The first were post-New Wave phenomena, such as factions wanting to take over the art scene, parceling out subject matter as though dividing up spoils, pursuing stardom influence, and promoting fashionable art. These phenomena were evident in criticism pursuing the latest trend and placing the emphasis on what was fashionable.
The second was catering to contemporary culture and market operations. In order to adapt and defuse criticism and to commercially deconstruct spirituality, there was a move towards recognizing surface expression and a rejection of the search for profundity
Thus, Wang Lin’s discussion of “in-depth painting” (shendu huihua) was mainly aimed market views and market phenomena that emerged after the Guangzhou Biennale.
[45] The China Experience (illustrated exhibition catalogue), 1993, pp.11-12.
[46] Letter of 7 January 1993 discussing Wang Lin’s China Experience exhibition. See: Ye Yongqing, Time Traveler: Essays by Ye Yongqing, China Youth Publishing House, 2010, p.157.
[47] In any case, until 31 December 1993, Zhang Xiaogang, together with Mao Xuhui, Wang Chuan, Ye Yongqing, and Zhou Chunya, exhibited his most recent work in The China Experience exhibition, and the works Zhang entered addressed specific questions these artists had previously discussed. This exhibition of contemporary art held in the Sichuan Art Museum was criticized by the leaders of the Chinese Artists Association. Because of its “sexual content”, Zhang Xiaogang was asked to remove his Pop experimental work of that year, Handwritten Notebooks (Shouchao-ben), from the exhibition, and the chairman of the Chinese Artists Association, Li Huanmin, was very opposed to Ye Yongqing’s silk cylindrical work titled Big Character Poster (Da zhaotie) because it carried an image of Mao Zedong and to four installation works titled Mawangdui. Yet the works exhibited in the show were, in fact, an important documentation of contemporary Chinese art in this period. For some time after the exhibition, Wang Lin continued to use the term “in-depth painting”. In the autumn of 1994, when Zhang Xiaogang participated in a group show at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts and exhibited his first “standardized” painting in the Big Family series, Wang Lin was extremely surprised, because in the smooth, flat portrait he could only see a superficial resemblance to traditional illustrated calendars, and he felt that any of the “profound” or “in-depth” qualities he advocated had disappeared from Zhang’s portraits.
[48] “I first knew of Magritte when I was just beginning to learn to paint, because my first art teacher wanted to ‘enhance my artistic training’ and has lent me a book treating the history of Western modern art published before Liberation in 1949. The book featured traditional vertical layout and full-form traditional Chinese characters; it had yellowing paper, as well as black and white illustrations, and was intended to be read from right to left. I remember that it began with a discussion of the French realists, Courbet and Millet, and in its last few pages concluded with a hasty look at Surrealism and Dada. (Zhang Xiaogang, My Best Friend: Magritte, 2000.)
[49] Tang Xin, Huajiadi: Conversations with Witnesses to the Development of Chinese Contemporary Art (1979-2004), 2005, p.81.
[50] [49] Franz Kafka, The Castle, the first paragraph of chapter I. Translation here is taken from J.A. Underwood tr., Franz Kafka: The Castle, Penguin Classics, 2000.
[51] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Lü Peng (18 October 1990)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, p.159.
[52] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Li Xianting and Liao Wen (21 July 1994)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, pp.231-232.
[53] Nie Rongqing, The Colors of the Kunming Moat, People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 2015.
[54] Taken from Huang Zhuan’s interview of Lü Peng titled “Experiential Identity and Cultural Judgment” (Jingyan shenfen yu wenhua panduan), interview conducted at Shaziyan in Chengdu, August 1996.
[55] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Li Xianting and Liao Wen (21 July 1994)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, p.232.
[56] In March 2011, in a lecture on art history to students in the College of Humanities and Arts of the Chinese Academy of Fine Arts, Zhang Xiaogang explained how history could be viewed in terms of individuals:
[Chinese] intellectuals’ concepts of history are limited to national history, ethnic history, and the history of Chinese socialism, and strictly speaking these are variants of the history of the nation. Since the 1980s, Chinese intellectuals began to really think about the relationship between the individual and society. So from a personal point of view, the study of individuals is equivalent to the study of Chinese history, which is not because I am saying that any particular individual is great, but rather because through an individual’s experiences over several few decades, people can feel the changes in the nation and in society. (Edited recording, unpublished)
[57] This essay was written in May 1994 and was modified by the author in January1995. At that time Huang Zhuan, the executive editor of Gallery (Hualang) magazine interviewed Zhang Xiaogang, who provided him with a written report on his recent work.
[58] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Chang Tsong-Zung (3 September 1994)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, pp.234-235.