PART TWO
THE COMING OF AGE OF A CHINESE MODERNIST:
1982-1991
Wonderful walking in the fog!
Life is lonely,
No one has seen another,
Each is alone.
Hermann Hesse, In the Fog
Let us love the “tragedy”, otherwise “life” for us will become an absurd, abnormal word; let us love our absurd lives; otherwise there is only “death”.
Zhang Xiaogang, Letter to Mao Xuhui (14 April 1987)
Return to Kunming
In January 1982 Zhang returned to Kunming, anxious to secure a “proper” job. In May, he informed Zhou Chunya who had already begun working at the Chengdu Painting Academy, that he had been “borrowed” by a song and dance troupe as an “art worker” engaged in the design and painting of stage sets. There is a photograph taken in 1982 showing how Zhang Xiaogang’s appearance and mood had radically changed from when he was photographed four years previously together with eleven classmates at the entrance of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in the Huangjueping district of Chongqing where they were all taking up studies for the first time. In that earlier photograph they are all dressed in similar clothing and, even though they are smiling, they do not look very worldly-wise. Standing to one side, Zhang Xiaogang has the anxious appearance of someone who had just come from the countryside; his clothing is also very plain, as though he has just been out herding cattle or goats. At that time he felt that among his classmates he had nothing to be proud of and nothing that could provide a basis for any possible inspiration. Yet after four years of study Zhang Xiaogang exuded confidence and a sense of purpose, thinking that he would find employment that would leave him sufficient time to paint freely. But he was beginning to feel anxious when, in a letter of 11 February 1982, he told Zhou Chunya that he was already exhausted looking for work, and that “as long as I can find a unit where I have some free time, I’ll be happy. The important thing isn’t where I go to work, but whether I stay on top in this relentless and aggressive struggle. Isn’t that what it’s all about? Who can imagine what our fate will be in several years’ time? I just hope that God always gives me the mental freedom to stay innocent and focused”. Indeed, at this time the talent of Zhang Xiaogang was an unknown quantity, and he could not be described as someone with burning ambition raring to go when his overriding concern was finding an employer unit and securing his next meal. It was a period when having no work unit meant not having a meal ticket, and not having an employer was tantamount to being subject to moral hazard; in a city where one could only rely on one’s own strength to find satisfying work, even the temporary economic support provided him by his parents and brothers made him feel uneasy. In another photograph of Zhang Xiaogang taken after the Spring Festival in 1982 in Shilin, the Stone Forest, we can see from Zhang Xiaogang’s face that, even though he might have been anxious about finding “proper” work, his appearance is markedly different from that of four years previously, and his inner confidence was not yet thwarted by his status as a “temporary worker”. The college students in the class of 1977 were all part of a generation full of ideals and hope, and regardless of their temporary circumstances, over a fairly long period of time they all came to see themselves as the elite of their times, as a generation holding the future of the country in their hands. However, on entering society they found that their actual circumstances dispelled the naïve fantasies they had entertained at college; Zhang Xiaogang found himself the victim of not having a regular job. In March, Zhang Xiaogang could no longer cope with being dependent on his parents and family members for his everyday survival, and he began to disregard his identity as a college student of the “new age” or his reputation as the successful new “Chinese van Gogh” that his fellow students had saddled him with, and took a job as a temporary worker at a glass factory introduced to him by his sister-in-law. Zhang Xiaogang has described his situation at the time in a letter:
“A strong sense of independence finally forced me to become a temporary worker in the glass factory, doing everything including construction work, and working every day with the bricklayers, the tilers, and the plasterers, as well as handling deliveries and dispatch. In this new world, everything I see, hear, and feel is different from anything I experienced in the past. At the lowest rung of this society, people haggle over every cent in their struggle to get the basic necessities for survival. It was like the old saying that people will die for money just like birds die for food. I’m at a loss finding that I have descended from savoring elite “college” life to now suddenly finding myself among the lowest echelons of society, and I feel like a schoolboy who is completely out of place. I also have to endure disdain and ridicule, but I have benefited greatly from this experience. Sometimes when I am walking through a crowd and people look at me like I am a monkey, I really wanted to just abandon my wheelbarrow and run off. But I think that this is the best opportunity to toughen myself up, so I remain silent and patient. People have to learn endurance in the end, don’t they? When I wake up every morning and stretch my aching body, I just tell myself to endure another day, just get through it, and somehow reconcile myself to this suffering. I only hope that this unexpected episode can be indelibly impressed, or imprinted, into my art and into my thinking”.[1]
In this letter of 3 March, despite his resentment and anxiety about his change in circumstances, he also told his friend Zhou Chunya about his nostalgia for their times they experienced on the grasslands: “I can’t stand this inexpressible loneliness, and the world around me seems so alien and cold! I really miss you guys, and the wonderful times when we galloped together across the grasslands!”[1] Indeed, after returning to Kunming, Zhang constantly reminisced about the times he spent with Zhou Chunya on the grasslands: learning to ride a horse, drinking goat’s milk, fishing, or riding on tractors, carts, or trucks looking for new places. From the first light of the morning until dusk, when they were not sleeping, they were painting. However, his new environment was utterly different and now he was almost at the bottom rung of society. However, even in such a situation, he still expressed his confidence in art: “Chunya, let’s encourage each other and fight tirelessly together for the most noble and the most beautiful art in the world”.[2]
Regardless, the times spent on the grasslands gradually became memories as new problems surfaced: “After leaving college, I faced an unfamiliar society and felt a sense of loss, a nagging absence, and terrible loneliness. Apart from having Mao Xuhui as someone familiar, I had very few friends, and given my frame of mind at the time I found it difficult to communicate with others around me. Apart from reading and listening to music every day, I was not in the state of mind to paint and I didn’t know if I should continue doing the sort of paintings I had painted as my graduation works”.[3]
Back in 1977, Mao Xuhui, like Zhang Xiaogang now, had found himself anxious about the job to which he had been assigned. They were around the same age, but Mao Xuhui’s working experience, being during the “Cultural Revolution” period, had been somewhat different to Zhang Xiaogang’s job as a construction worker; Mao had supervised adults assigned to propaganda work: preparing the propaganda posters called “big-character posters”, cutting stencils, heading out with lime-buckets to write slogans, and traipsing the streets and visiting apartments to drop off leaflets. On graduating from high school, Mao Xuhui had been assigned to work in the city’s department store. With no European or Western books or illustrations available to read or peruse, he and his young friends only had paintings and music from the Soviet Union to satisfy their curiosity about foreign cultures. The elementary Soviet textbook on sketching titled Letters for Beginners exerted an enormous impact on Mao Xuhui, as it had on Zhang Xiaogang. After 1975 Mao Xuhui was introduced to the work of the nineteenth-century Russian painter Ivan I. Shishkin and began copying his work titled The Distant Forest. Mao Xuhui entered the Kunming Teachers College Department of Art (now the Yunnan Arts Institute) as a student in “the class of [19]77”, but was in fact soon engaged in making plaster sculptures for the college. “One evening, when walking back from the cafeteria across the playing field, Mao Xuhui suddenly heard the school’s loudspeakers broadcasting a nocturne by Schubert that suddenly reduced him to tears. People were almost motionless, quite unable to believe what they were hearing; the fact that such music could now be broadcast publicly seemed to suggest that the world had utterly changed”.[4] After Mao Xuhui took up his studies at college the first paintings he saw as prints were the nineteenth-century Russian painters popular in the Soviet Union, including Isaak Iliich Levitan, Ilya Yafimovich Repin, and Vasili Ivanovich Surikov, all of whom enchanted him. In the same way, after 1979, new developments in China such as Wu Guanzhong’s advocacy of formal beauty, Yuan Yunsheng’s airport murals, and the introductions to early Western modernist art that appeared in the pages of Fine Arts (Meishu) magazine all shook the long-standing unquestioned beliefs of Mao Xuhui. On one occasion, a college teacher had told him that even artists like Repin could never be regarded as being a part of “art history”. This shocked Mao Xuhui whose “enthusiasms had finally and firmly turned to Impressionism and European painting, particularly the works of Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, and Gauguin”. This discovery and experience created bonds of empathy between Mao and Zhang because they found themselves attracted by similar new feelings, values, and interests.
It is said that it was following the strong recommendation of their fellow student Cheng Conglin that Mao Xuhui and Zhang Xiaogang decided in 1980 to travel outside the Southwest, to visit artists and see the world. In the summer vacation, Mao Xuhui, Zhang Xiaogang, Ye Yongqing, and Liu Yong traveled by boat down the Yangtze from Chongqing, passing through Yichang, Wuhan, Nanjing, Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Shanghai, and then traveled north to Beijing, before finally returning to Kunming. In Shanghai they visited Chen Yifei, who was about to travel to the United States, as well as the elderly Yan Wenliang who made a name for himself in the 1930s for his oil paintings. Yan Wenliang showed his young visitors the sketches he once made in Europe. During their time in Shanghai, they also visited Yu Yunjie and Yu Xiaofu, two painters highly praised by Chen Danqing. They also undertook an excursion from Shanghai to Hangzhou, to visit Shang Ding, a painter from the Kunming Military Region who was a graduate student of the Zhejiang Academy of Art. Finally, the young men went to see the famous murals titled Water Sprinkling Festival (Poshui-jie) by Yuan Yunsheng at Beijing’s Capital Airport. At the Central Academy of Fine Arts, the teacher Sun Jingbo also showed these visitors from the Southwest the paintings that had been selected for the National Art Exhibition by Chen Danqing who had, unfortunately, just left for Tibet. They were also shown the Academy’s collection of European paintings. An exhibition of contemporary oil paintings at the China Art Gallery (today’s National Art Museum of China) also made a profound impression on the visitors. Mao Xuhui subsequently was full of passionate praise for the Stars artist Ma Desheng. Ye Yongqing, in the account of this trip he wrote many years later and titled Journey of the Heart (Xinlu licheng), emotionally recorded how these young students from the Southwest were filled with reverence and awe for the big-name artists they visited.
In his third year at college, Mao Xuhui read the autobiography of the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg, People, Years, Life, and began to realize that art was far from being about the quest for compelling realism or the accurate portrait; Ehrenburg’s introductions to artists including Modigliani, Picasso, Léger, Soutine, Rivera, Malevich, and others were “an eye-opener” for him. Perhaps because of the similarities between the Chinese and Soviet political and social systems, Mao Xuhui found another aspect of Ehrenburg’s autobiography intriguing: “Another interesting aspect of the book was the author’s description and analysis of the situation in literary and art circles after the success of the revolution in the Soviet Union. The revolution was successful in setting up a worker’s state, but it could not solve the problem of ideology. Art was turned into propaganda, and truly talented artists were excluded, or even persecuted. This was exactly how it is in our reality”. Regarding art and social issues, Mao Xuhui might have been more sensitive than Zhang Xiaogang, but, like Zhang, he hoped to grasp issues using his inner feelings. Both young men lost interest in literary or narrative painting, but they acknowledged that the works of “scar” artists like Cheng Conglin’s Snow on an Unrecorded Day in 1968 (1968 nian X yue X ri xue) had value because they touched people’s emotions. In terms of art’s understanding of human problems, they both also keenly felt that the murals of Yuan Yunsheng, the line drawings of Jiang Tiefeng (a well-known Yunnan artist who produced decorative paintings with repeated color lines on “Korean” or handmade paper), and the “formal beauty” espoused by Wu Guanzhong were superficial and irrelevant in that they did not address human problems. As these two young men saw it, such painting was mere “decoration”. At the time of his graduation, Mao Xuhui was keenly interested in Paul Cézanne, and his graduation thesis was in fact simply titled Paul Cezanne. In evaluating Zhang Xiaogang’s graduation paintings, Mao said frankly: “Your graduation paintings are better than those of Chen Danqing, because, while it is a moot point whether Chen’s paintings are authentic, yours have the genuine aroma of yak butter, even though they might not necessarily be great works. Your paintings are powerful, and that’s why they excite me”. From their understanding acquired from books of the lives of artists in Paris at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, Mao Xuhui and his friends who were all about to graduate created an illusory “Montmartre Café” culture, in which they lived out romantically fantasized Bohemian lives as though they were artists in Paris, painting, discussing art, and “pursuing tarts”,[5] their imaginative construction of Paris’s artistic milieu. When Mao Xuhui returned after graduation to the department store that originally employed him, he was disappointed. The bland window designs and advertising copy made him realize that social reality was not the poeticized fantasy he had originally envisaged, and the reality was that there was no culture, there was no art, and “society did not take art seriously at all”. In the society in which these young people found themselves, the artistic and cultural milieu they conjured up did not exist. Moreover, for Mao Xuhui and his friends, the Artists’ Association was “remote” and “impenetrable”, and there was no avenue facilitating their participation in official exhibitions. They reality they confronted basically lacked the meaning they imagined it to possess. On the eve of his graduation, Mao Xuhui, stimulated by the knowledge of aesthetics, contemporary fiction, and the theatre of the absurd he had acquired from listening to lectures delivered by Li Zehou, Gao Ertai,[6] and other scholars, presented under the auspices of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences at the Kunming National Minorities Institute, still remained hopeful about his future, but soon “his dream of being a painter was shattered by the rigorous eight-hour working day imposed on him as well as by the demand to produce irrelevant paintings, unbearably exacerbating the conflict between his reality and his ideals”. At this time, similar experiences helped sustain the artistic dreams shared by like-minded young artists subject to similar circumstances.
It was probably an old classmate of Mao Xuhui working in the Kunming Song and Dance Troupe who provided Zhang Xiaogang with the opportunity to meet the head of the troupe. Zhang Xiaogang’s painting titled The Storm Is Approaching (Baoyu jiangzhi) that had been published in the January 1982 issue of the preeminent Chinese journal Fine Arts (Meishu) had also made a good impression on the troupe leader. As a result Zhang Xiaogang became an “art worker” in the song and dance group in the May of that year. The troupe also allocated dormitory accommodation to Zhang Xiaogang, thereby providing him with the conditions necessary to party, drink, listen to music, and “chase girls”. Even though Zhang Xiaogang was not satisfied with the job and vowed to leave within five years, his reading, experiences, and artistic practice here made this the most important period in his early art career. Prior to this appointment, Zhou Chunya, in a letter from Chengdu dated 18 February, had offered encouragement to Zhang Xiaogang, concerned by the stress that finding a job was causing his friend:
I just received the January issue of Fine Arts and in it I saw the photograph of your painting that seems so familiar. My wife and I are so happy that your hard work has paid off, and we immediately thought that this publication will be helpful for getting a job. Is there still time to get assigned? Even if it’s now too late, this kind of encouragement can only benefit your future career as an artist.[7]
On 22 February, Zhang Xiaogang’s first birthday after graduating, he still had no job. Mao Xuhui visited him for a chat and the two of them went out looking for a restaurant to drink and discuss their future. From this day on, Mao Xuhui and Zhang Xiaogang began to have much closer contact with each other. They were always together - eating, buying books, and swapping art magazines. They ploughed through every newly published work of Western philosophy, and of course were always discussing books like Irving Stone’s biography of Van Gogh, Lust for Life. Previously, they had only communicated their feelings and experiences of reading through letters, but in Kunming they could discuss everything face to face. Zhang Xiaogang suggested in a letter to Mao Xuhui, “I think we’re both not doing enough”; he hoped that they would not be trapped like ordinary workers in a daily grind of repetitive and boring work. The outcome of their discussions was that they went to Guishan. In Guishan, Zhang seemed to regain the mood he had experienced on the grasslands with Zhou Chunya and the purity of nature and those who dwelled there did at least make him feel relaxed and happy once again. But what was now different from 1979 was that Zhang Xiaogang no longer felt that nature in Guishan was unsullied, and the faith of a convert he originally felt for the purity of nature was tinged by complex experiences, perhaps in his subconscious, so that his understanding of nature was now intermingled with something vaguely problematic, although Zhang Xiaogang had not yet become aware of the relationship that existed between the purity of nature and his own reality. Mao Xuhui completed many sketches that later resulted in his “Guishan” series of paintings; Zhang Xiaogang also filled his sketchbooks with everything he saw at Guishan, filled with the same infatuation for purity that saw his feelings projected onto the grasslands. Now he sketched tender images of the “red clay”, “the local girls”, “locals going to the market”, “mothers and children”, “shepherds”, “goat pens”, and “farmers pulling corn”, as well as images of the “sun setting behind the mountains” and “the wind blowing through the hills”. However, he was also beginning to think about other questions, and the upshot was that, after returning to Kunming, a new life different from that at college would begin.
“One afternoon, at the beginning of 1982, Big Mao [8] brought a friend to my room for a drink, and said: ‘This is Pan Dehai. He got himself assigned here after graduating in the Northeast, and he’s also interested in the modern style. In this way, together with Ye Yongqing who regularly returned to Kunming, the three of us formed a small circle of ‘modernists’. We formed the core of a group interested in literature and art that would grow to number thirty or forty of us in Kunming after a few years. China was continuing to open up, and the whole nation was filled with an intense thirst for knowledge and a sense of awakening. At the time Xinhua Bookstores were packed with people; books were constantly being reprinted and new titles were appearing. When we got our monthly salary the first thing we would do was buy meal tickets, and the second thing we did was go to a Xinhua Bookstore to buy a pile of books. We only needed to see the word ‘modern’ in the title and we would buy the book. We would snap up any title that related to modern philosophy, modern music, or modern literature, and we also ordered modern cultural magazines, with titles such as “modern art”, “modern architecture”, and so on. I couldn’t even remember which titles we had read, there were so many. My bedroom was filled with modernist books, and modern music, including Shostakovich, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky, played on the record player. My walls were covered with prints in various modern styles, mostly cut from a plethora of magazines. In my pure space, I felt completely at ease, and armed with my books, I temporarily forgot my vague sense of loneliness”.[9]
Zhang Xiaogang began reading extensively during this period of depression and anxiety. He was eager to have more like-minded people endorse his belief in art. Pan Dehai who came from Jilin in the Northeast was another young person who had been fond of painting since childhood, and like Zhang Xiaogang, he began to satisfy his talent by copying from comic-books with wartime settings like The White-Haired Girl (Baimao nü) and The Story of the Liaison Station (Jiaotongzhan de gushi). He was later sent down to the countryside as an “educated youth” and managed to learn sketching and plaster of Paris sculpture at the cultural center in the county where he was assigned. “Little Pan” – as everyone called him –graduated in early 1982 from the Art Department of Northeast Normal University; fired up by the beauty and diversity of Yunnan he saw in a photograph album and imagining that it was probably an ideal place for painting, Pan Dehai undertook the spiritual journey to Yunnan. He was assigned to teach in a middle school for the offspring of personnel in the Yunnan Provincial Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources. The warm climate of Yunnan fortuitously cured the rheumatoid arthritis he contracted in the bitterly cold Northeast, but the dormitory room the college allocated to Pan Dehai had no windows, though this did not make Pan Dehai anxious. He calmly painted a window on the wall and so had a view of the sky outside that he and the friends he invited around could enjoy. Pan Dehai’s college was Mao Xuhui’s mother’s alma mater, so he too soon became acquainted with Mao Xuhui. Like Mao Xuhui and Zhang Xiaogang, Pan Dehai had long hair and it framed his honest and guileless face. Mao and Pan discussed van Gogh and analyzed Cézanne, and before long Mao Xuhui took Pan Dehai along to Zhang Xiaogang’s dormitory: they would often gather in the dim light, drinking, chatting, and discussing all aspects of art. Later, their frequent gatherings to discuss modern art led their friends to nickname them the “Three Musketeers”. In late 1982, when Pan Dehai first saw the Clay Forest at Yuanmou, it was as though he sustained the shock of a baptism, and he quickly completed a group of almost abstract paintings titled The Clay Forest, which made a deep impression on people.
For many of the young people who later became famous artists, painting was an instinctive passion. Ye Yongqing, the youth from Kunming whom Zhang Xiaogang had got to know before he entered the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, was just such a person. When he was five, Ye Yongqing had submitted work to the magazine Little Friend (Xiao pengyou). When he was 17 years old, he made himself an art folio and began to learn sketching from the Chinese edition of the Soviet manual Letters for Beginners, thereby decisively embarking on his painting career. Ye Yongqing escaped to the countryside after graduating from high school, but he had no work. Before being admitted to the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, he had had gained a range of experience as a building worker, working on a farm feeding animals, as a substitute teacher in a rural high school, and as a caretaker on a farm. But none of these experiences interrupted his pursuit of painting. In 1978 Ye Yongqing matriculated to the oil painting department of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, and he became part of the class of 78. In school Zhang Xiaogang and Ye Yongqing were close, both being from Kunming, and their fellow students called them “the two eccentrics of Yunnan”. From the beginning, their sketches were vivid and spirited, but lacked solidity and resonance; later, in Zhang Xiaogang’s sketches we see a precision of line combined with strong anatomical structure, reminiscent of the assertive line-work of the Russian and Soviet painter Nikolai Ivanovich Fechin, something his fellow students often commented on. Like Mao Xuhui and Zhang Xiaogang, Ye Yongqing was also influenced and moved by Ilya Ehrenburg’s autobiography, which he said was “like a beacon of dazzlingly brilliant light that illuminated me, influenced me, moved me, and entranced me…” With a taste somewhat different to that of Mao Xuhui and Zhang Xiaogang, Ye Yongqing was fascinated by Xishuangbanna, its ethnic Dai stockade villages, subtropical scenery, animals, plants, and simple folk, and many years later, even though artists were extremely careful to avoid ethnic and vernacular symbols, Ye Yongqing never retreated from the imagery and symbolism he found seared into his memory. It is likely that artists such as Paul Gauguin continued to stimulate Ye Yongqing and his sense of modernism seems to have inevitably hinged on a purity that transcended symbolism. Thus, Ye Yongqing’s graduation paintings, The Xishuangbanna Painting Group (Xishuangbanna zuhua), were steeped in a strong sense of regional color apparent to all in this young Yunnan painter’s work, even though Ye Yongqing insisted that his art was intrinsically linked with French modernism. After graduation, Ye Yongqing stayed on at the college to become a teacher, but in the days following, he not only maintained his correspondence with Zhang Xiaogang in Kunming, but also often went to Kunming to party with the artists.
For those young and restless Chinese artists, 1982 was a fresh and promising year, and there were several major exhibitions of artists from China’s West in the course of that year. In April, Zhang Xiaogang, Pan Dehai, and Ye Yongqing went to Beijing, though at different times, to see the Han Mo Collection, and there they saw for the first time some of the original masters they had previously only seen in albums. At this time Zhang Xiaogang retained his fondness for classical European art, and he was filled with unbridled admiration for Rembrandt’s exquisite artistry and use of light; Zhang Xiaogang was unconsciously captivated by the mystery of light, perhaps as a result of a subconscious visual memory of unique solar faculae. Interestingly, he discovered that Van Gogh’s paintings were not as psychotic and mad as he had previously imagined; on the contrary, he found them warm and, years later, when he walked into the Van Gogh Museum, he felt that his original judgment was endorsed. Zhang Xiaogang’s feeling for European art did not descend to a run-of-the-mill analysis of either its compelling realism or its disarray; it hinged on his discovery of the inner motivation and order or sequence of the subjects of a painting. Earlier, in March, Mao Xuhui had gone to Beijing where he had been fascinated to see everything exhibited in the collection of the Jewish-American oil tycoon Armand Hammer. At this time, the elongated image in Modigliani’s work The Maid made a big impact on Mao Xuhui, who found in the distorted figure in this painting a mode of expressing the soul and, after returning to Kunming, Mao Xuhui completed several experiments in this vein. This inner need also determined that Mao Xuhui took a special interest in the paintings on display in Beijing’s Palace of Nationalities in the Exhibition of Expressionist Paintings from the Federal Republic of Germany. Henceforth, this determined Mao Xuhui’s expressionistic path and timbre: in his view, only spasmodic strokes could directly reveal the subject’s inner soul. In any event, in the spring of 1982, these restless artists were always together, discussing their art, drinking their wine, telling stories to the women around them, and most often discussing their individual experiences of reading.
In 1982, when Zhang Xiaogang was still caught up in the anxiety of waiting to land a job, he could never suppress his yearning to return to simplicity in order to liberate his unconscious desires; he spent his time in a frenzy of reading and drinking. Zhou Chunya in his letters constantly encouraged Zhang Xiaogang not to give up, while also looking for work opportunities for Zhang Xiaogang; only when his work situation was relatively stable did Zhang Xiaogang again take up his brush to fulfill his desires. He told Zhou Chunya that he had already been spending a lot of time reading and “now his passion for reading was intense”; he felt that he had acquired a new of attitude to life. Yet he also told his fellow student that now he smoked heavily and often felt lonely. In July, Zhou Chunya told him that he was going back to the grasslands because he missed the days that they had spent together at Ruoergai. Zhou Chunya also explained to Zhang what he now understood by modern art: “I still think it is proximity to the goodness of ‘nature’ ... figural things are not things we can simply forget, and the thought of Cézanne ‘facing nature’ is profound, even though Cézanne’s ideas led to Cubism...” And so on. After he received the letter from Zhou Chunya, Zhang Xiaogang still expressed his longing for the grasslands: “I really envy you, going to the grasslands. I’m trapped in a small room, but I often recall the billowing white clouds on the grasslands, the fierce dry winds, and I want to go riding obliviously on a white horse across the vast plains ... ... Those days were special! The only thing on our minds was the limitlessness, and the intense urge to paint. How simple it all was! Chunya, whenever (let’s try next year, or the year after) we go back there together, we can sit on the edge of the slope and continue our reverie”. In this letter, Zhang Xiaogang told Zhou about the incidentals of his work at the song and dance troupe, and how he and another art worker (Sun Shifan) now had a large room of their own, so he was free of the restrictions of home and could also wait have friends around to drink at any time. He said he was painting on three-ply timber, but was not as pleased as he had been with his earlier paintings, “I am not painting well and this is quite disturbing”. His views of nature echoed those of Zhou Chunya, but he said he wanted “his spiritual senses to experience and discover its authentic mystery”. Perhaps because at this time he had a stable job, he could fully and irrepressibly discuss his own views, and he was eager to communicate with others. In his musings about reading and understanding, he was beginning to look for the exact kind of art he wanted:
When we face nature, what moves us is not simply the trees or the grasslands, but the communion of our senses (especially our sixth sense) with nature. This communion awakens and balances the nature within us, and tempers our innermost feelings. The uniquely human emotions of “empathy” and “transference” make us create our art, connecting our imaginations to the world; in the process of catharsis, the depth, breadth, and individuality of the creator’s “feelings” determine the value of the artwork, surely? This is what I sometimes think when I stand beneath a tree. Similarly, if perfect beauty is the pinnacle, then I prefer to work the ground between “perfect beauty” and “non-beauty”. I imagine that I can thus connect between the two, constructing a rich and solid bridge that every traveler seeking beauty is able to cross.[10]
Three months later, Zhang Xiaogang was given his own room in the dormitory, and he continued to drink and paint. In November, he went with Mao Xuhui and several others to their “old haunts in Guishan”, but something now felt different about the serenity, harmony, and idyllic scenery of the place; in fact Zhang Xiaogang now wanted to get away from what he called “genre painting”. From the outset, immaculately beautiful paintings with figures were not what he wanted to paint. So, even though he was painting from life in Guishan, his paintings began to comprise erratic and jerky lines. They were vigorous but somewhat quirky. During this trip to Guishan, Zhang Xiaogang seemed to feel that his paintings needed to change, and his description of Guishan was now somewhat unusual:
Especially when I climb the hillside and gaze at the sky, looking at the blue sky that is endless and at the goats that walk these trails daily, the mountains enclose the silence. The trees thrust their thorny trunks into the sky, the houses all keep their lips sealed, the sheep, the white goats, the black goats, the melancholy and disdainful goats, all seem to have some prior knowledge, the black mountain goats are aloof and powerful as they perch on the towering rocks and watch the sun sinking down into the valley below. The expressive and diminutive Sani girl is at one moment swaying across the red clay and in the next instant she is lost among the trees and stones, her parched brown face marked with the shadows of the wind, as the ethereal sounds of a flute waft from the distance. In such moment, my feelings seem to have completely changed and the idyll is only a part of her.[11]
Zhang was not satisfied with his painting on this Guishan trip; “I had many memories of the past as well as many ideas, but my sketching was especially superficial”. He said that even on the grasslands he had no enthusiasm, so when he went back to Kunming his only recourse was to shut the door, and in his little room he read, looked at pictures in albums, and re-acquainted himself with the masters of Western art. On the evening of 24 December 1982, he told Zhou Chunya in a letter, he was in a black mood, but out of habit wrote “tomorrow is Christmas, I hope you are happy”! In the course of the year Fine Arts magazine had published paintings by Zhang Xiaogang in two issues - The Storm Is Approaching (Baoyu jiangzhi), The Good Earth (Wotu), and Clouds in the Sky (Tian shang de yun), and his works had even been included in an exhibition of oil paintings from Sichuan staged in the Shenzhen Gallery by the China Artists’ Association’s Sichuan branch. Yet what was gradually prompting this young man in Kunming to reexamine his inner world was anything from philosophical writings (Nietzsche, Sartre, Freud, Bergson) or about foreign artists (the biography of Van Gogh), as well as anything from anywhere about Western modernist art. Perhaps because of his mother’s temperament and his sensitivity about his early experiences, Zhang Xiaogang almost instinctively wanted to further remove himself from “genre paintings” and “vernacular art”, or possibly he was psychologically stimulated by the subtle and intriguing distortions presented by Expressionist, Cubist and Surrealist painting. A portrait of a Sani woman he completed in December 1982 reveals that Zhang Xiaogang had already discarded finer detail in his expression, and his almost flat line (graffiti-like) painting had lost the warmth of his Grasslands (Caoyuan) Series, and the colors were not as vibrant. It retained Zhang Xiaogang’s innate hesitant and cautious feel, but he sought to avoid any familiar “beauty” in the work. As 1983 came around, an uneasy and inner uncertainty was beginning to emerge. In selecting an image, this image would not come from the grasslands or from Guishan, at least not from any apparent image of the grasslands or Guishan, and he seemed to feel vaguely that there were images and shapes that might possibly come from a more concealed place. However, at that time he could not say for certain. His voracious reading had already made Zhang Xiaogang familiar with Sartre, and Sartre’s ideas on personal choice provided profound encouragement for Zhang Xiaogang’s own position on freedom in art. This also resonated precisely with his reading of Nietzsche; Nietzsche’s idea that “God had died”, that there was no longer any authority or guide, and that people had lost direction at the same time gave people a brand-new freedom, people no longer had to accept direction by heaven, by gods or by leaders, and people’s behavior, lives, and ethics were no longer constrained by naturally effective rules, and the legitimacy of the church or any other institution that claimed to have a monopoly on truth and on precepts was rescinded. Man made his own laws and assumed responsibility for his self. The existence of the artist upheld the highest freedom and his creative work fulfilled his existence: this was the choice made by Zhang Xiaogang and his generation. The intellectual orientation, aesthetic taste, and creative artistic practice of Zhang Xiaogang and his friends were very similar in many respects. If we compare the paintings from this period of Mao Xuhui and Ye Yongqing, they have much in common: they are cognizant of the charm of nature, they express the ardent wish for purity and seek to keep the secular at a distance, and they are concerned for mysticism drawing on the primitive spirit. Zhang Xiaogang, however, seems to want to expedite his escape from this trap, by fleeing the all too familiar inertia of happiness. His lively yet grotesque sketches are obvious efforts to flee from the attitudes that sustain realistic painting while his forceful strokes are clearly reminiscent of Van Gogh and his colors suggest the oil paintings of Millet. However, he is still not satisfied with what he has achieved, and his paintings represent different experiments. Reading in the dim lamplight, he and his friends spent day after day living their Bohemian life of illusion, knowing they were not society’s mainstream, but in imagining the earlier French poets and painters, he also subconsciously affirmed his own future strength:
In the years from 1982 to 1984, along with my constant ‘reading’, I was painting all kinds of ‘experimental’ works. They were a pastiche of Romanticism, Expressionism, Surrealism, and Dada. From Millet to Picasso, from Kokoschka to Magritte, every day was different, and whenever I finished a painting, I threw it away or gave it to someone. Going into anyone’s studio at that time, you would find yourself in the atmosphere of a laboratory, with books and works everywhere plastered with the label “modern”. Everyone lent each other books, discussed intellectual issues, smoked, and drank. Although we were around twenty, we had long hair, and dressed in dirty and shabby old clothes; we became marginal men who consciously or unconsciously looked serious, and we were social rebels pretending to be long-suffering grown-ups”.[12]
During that fruitful period in which he was gradually coming to understand his emotions and experiences, Zhang Xiaogang was fond of the music of The Carpenters, whose fresh, smooth melodies tinged with melancholy, and natural singing style brought him solace. But in 1983, Zhang described how this life of a free spirit that he craved was fraught with danger, because even though open attitudes in the economic sphere were officially condoned, the scope of expression in the ideological and cultural fields was still restricted by officialdom. In 1983, a number of intellectuals and officials did openly express views in the fields of philosophy and economics that differed from the official line, and it goes without saying that debates on “humanism” and the issue of “alienation” developed into a discussion of non-Marxist economics and liberal tendencies in literature and art. In fact, some ideas and attitudes to life that seemed to come from the West spread to the wider community; long hair, flared trousers, and sunglasses, not to mention lavish drinking and sexual permissiveness, all came to be regarded as lifestyles that corroded the socialist system. On 11-12 October, the 12th Central Committee of the CPC held its second plenary session, and the Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping warned that he had not realized that there were still people in the Party who advocated humanism and promoted human rights and values, which constituted spiritual pollution. The essence of spiritual pollution was spreading a lack of faith in the cause of socialism and communism and in the leadership of the Communist Party. He warned Party members that it was imperative to strengthen the Party’s ideological leadership not only over theoretical and literary and art circles, but also in education, the press, publishing, radio, and television, where similar problems of mass culture and mass ideological and political work needed to be resolved. On 16 November 1983, People’s Daily published an editorial titled “Construct Spiritual Civilization and Oppose Spiritual Pollution”, and the country shortly thereafter launched the first old-style nation-wide political campaign since 1976. Nobody could escape this political context. The campaign to “eliminate spiritual pollution” entailed a rectification within Party ranks and a clean-up of society outside the Party; Zhang Xiaogang was unable to escape the political campaign in the song and dance troupe. In a letter to Zhou Chunya he wrote:
I hear that more than one hundred works by Edvard Munch are now being exhibited in Chengdu, but I do not know whether the show will come to Kunming. Things in China are too uncertain and with the current campaign against spiritual pollution, exhibitions by many major foreign painters have been cancelled. It’s such a pity! In Kunming things are very tightly controlled, and my employer unit wants all illustrations of paintings that suggest ‘nudity’ handed in and registered so that ‘the government can guarantee security. Moreover, a number of students from the class of 1977 at the art college have been arrested and their alleged ‘crime’ is having once taken photographs of nudes. The atmosphere is very repressive. There are lots of opportunities in Beijing, where you can find a foreign wife and leave the country, but what can you do in Kunming? I don’t know, but you are right about one thing, the key thing is being able to do our art work, so we should lock ourselves up in an ivory tower and dream. As long as we can dream, something might come our way, right? We must now be prepared, and the first priority is protecting ourselves.[13]
The political campaign did not last long, and those familiar with earlier political campaigns were intellectually prepared as the tension and terror grew. Interestingly, although the controversy in philosophical circles was limited to the basic concepts of humanism, young people, students and academics at universities and within the community were already reaching out to Western thinking and ideas in all fields. For example, the concept of “the absurd” was not only applied to China’s successive political campaigns or to the tragedy of the “cultural revolution”, but was also used to describe the indescribable dilemma of an individual caught up in the current era of transition. Zhang Xiaogang’s friends who frequently gathered in his dormitory room to drink discussed the ideas of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Freud, Sartre, and Camus and bought large quantities of their works in translation.[14] They no longer discussed the purity of nature and Impressionism, but grappled instead with such questions as how art could express the absurd and the stifling of the subconscious by rationality, as well as questions concerning death and despair. Alcohol, cigarettes, and women became their tools for personal release. Nie Rongqing has described Zhang Xiaogang in 1983 as follows:
1983 was his most enervating year, and his ‘Left Bank’ hostel became one of the art strongholds of Kunming. Little by little, everyone began to think of this place as a public art center. The key hung over the door and his friends all knew that if he was out they could open the door and go in. As was often the case, Zhang Xiaogang went back to his dormitory at night to find his room full of people some of whom he knew and some he didn’t know. Or perhaps both groups had already left, leaving slips letting Zhang know what books they had borrowed. He did not have a private life of his own. Often there were eccentrics who would drop in on him at midnight, and talk all through the night about suffering and philosophy. There were also friends who had broken up with their girlfriends who would come knocking on his door at midnight and say they wanted to stay with him, and so he would be up all night talking with them about their disappointments in love. Zhang Xiaogang’s disciplined life was chaotically disrupted by all this.[15]
In this way, Zhang Xiaogang began to be drawn to more untoward ideals......
Society, independence, reading, drinking, and women all became elements drawing this sensitive and fragile young artist from the grasslands and Guishan towards a lifestyle more like that of Hermann Hesse’s Goldmund. Initially, classical and realist art as well as the education he had received impelled Zhang Xiaogang to develop in the direction of Narcissus, and even when led on by Impressionism, he had initially simply been breathing fresh air that simply served to prepare him to be able to grow in sensitivity. However, just as Narcissus told the abbot of the Abbey of Mariabronn, one’s destiny and mission cannot possibly always be determined by what one wishes, but by other predetermined things. It is true that there was something predetermined by Zhang Xiaogang’s genetic makeup, and change would be inevitable. Zhang Xiaogang read many novels by Hermann Hesse and could remember the plots which profoundly touched him. Narcissus and Goldmund was a work Hesse wrote in his middle age, and the two characters in the novel delineated two broad aspects of the individuality and personality of Zhang Xiaogang, and in the period from 1982 to 1984 we can clearly see Zhang Xiaogang as the Goldmund who leaves the Abbey. Prior to then, Zhang Xiaogang had possibly never examined his innermost desires, even though he could sense the twinges of their prompting. He was seduced by nature and purity and he instinctively felt that for him Guishan symbolized his spirit returning home. However, a modernist like Baudelaire did not see things that way and warned that it is nature that forces man to sleep and eat, and the assaults of the climate effectively or ineffectively force man to protect himself; nature also forces man to kill, eat, imprison, and abuse his fellow man. He said that nature even teaches sin. Baudelaire compared nature and religion, and warned that goodness was in fact always a man-made construct. Zhang Xiaogang felt instinctively that he must avoid what was only superficially true and good. When Zhang Xiaogang was in hospital, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness fully encapsulated what he was feeling, but the explanations revolving around “existence” and “nothingness” described by this French philosopher might not have been the focus of Zhang Xiaogang’s interest. A stronger basis for his conviction that “existence is emptiness” was only hinted at by Sartre; more significant for Zhang was Kierkegaard’s anxiety in the face of freedom and Heidegger’s description of how the anxiety concerning the grasp of nothingness plunged him into an infinitely profound abyss. This is why in Zhang’s works of 1983 we no longer see sketches of an idyllic pastoral, but monsters emerging from the forest or fleeing from the underworld – the deep unconscious sedimentation in Zhang Xiaogang’s mental world.
Indeed, Zhang had already left the holy abbey and had arrived in “the village”. “Goldmund’s” inner fear continued to grow, but Zhang Xiaogang was also accumulating new experiences and stimuli. He quickly became familiar with these descriptions of issues of humanity and human nature, and he wanted to release the energy which he had not examined, an energy that did not depend on an exacting imagination or mentally demanding deliberate meditation, but on coincidence that would lead him out of a crisis over which he had no control. In July1983, in the summer, Zhang Xiaogang completed a self-portrait. The work was an objectively accurate portrayal although it is better described as the depiction of a young man who is about to thoroughly abandon aesthetic conventions but who still retains limited restraint; at this juncture, he is not trying to go to “the village”, but is about to plunge into another world from which he will never return. In Hermann Hesse’s novel, Narcissus stands for reason, moderation, and norms, and when he first goes to “the village” and enjoys himself with the woman, Goldmund who is afflicted with a nervous illness comforts him: “Well, ‘going to the village’ was out of bounds. But there are so many forbidden things that people do and later one can simply laugh it off, but if a person does not confess and repent, then things end and have no consequences” [可是有许多犯禁的事人们尽可以做，做过以后尽可以一笑置之，要不也可以忏悔忏悔，然后事情就了啦，同它再没有关系。CHECK]. Zhang Xiaogang probably agreed with Narcissus’ retort to Goldmund: “Don’t you realize that a libertine’s life can be a shortcut to sainthood?” Zhang Xiaogang’s self-portrait was his earliest work in an expressionist style and at this time he was influenced by Kokoschka. His rough brush strokes did not diminish the complex expression in his eyes; the elements of determination show that while he is undoubtedly a saint of art he will stay the course, and the elements of intelligence seem to reveal something secret, “I can find another path that leads me to God!”
At the end of the year, Zhang Xiaogang went with Mao Xuhui to live in Guishan for a month, and there he completed more than twenty landscape oil paintings and a number of sketches. This batch of landscape paintings were Zhang Xiaogang’s most uniquely personal works to date: he had extricated himself from the deep sentimental nostalgia of the Russian style; he had discarded his unflinching obsession with the natural vitality of the Barbizon style; he used the brush strokes of Van Gogh and other artists that evoked freedom, but he also instilled the melancholy and bitterness of El Greco into his work, although we can of course see that he was gazing out from the threshold of madness and the white entangled branches of the trees stand out against the gloom of Toledo’s blackness. The artist allowed his brush strokes and colors to leap and tremble in line with the dictates of his feelings and soul, yet, in fact, the brightness of the colors was lost, and only an atmosphere of uncertainty and unease emerged from the composition, the brush strokes, and the hellish landscape; an intensely melancholy poetic mood was expressed through his extremely powerful brush strokes. In 1985, Ye Yongqing wrote a short essay about Zhang’s early paintings of Guishan which he originally wanted to publish in China Art News (Zhongguo meishu bao), but probably because of the political campaign raging at the time the piece came to the attention of the editors who decided that it could not be published. In this essay that resembled a prose poem Ye Yongqing did not describe the physical world in his friend’s works but described instead his own feelings engendered by the work:
In the highlands, there is a plateau, and in that wilderness wild plants flourish and a small cottage is being built. The cottage cannot keep you warm and cannot even provide shelter from the wind and rain. If the cottage is in the distance or nearby does not matter; as long as its shape fills your nights it is sufficient. You are no longer a corpse floating within four walls; you know your way. You are a child in the house. You need to mark your position, participate in the world, and discover what exactly makes this world so miserable, what gives this silent world of stillness meaning.[16]
“White Ghosts”
Zhang Xiaogang’s understanding of the philosophy surrounding death was initially only limited to books and concepts, but it would soon became an experience that could be described after his “decadent” and unstructured life plunged him into an abyss of mental and spiritual affliction. Around Christmas 1983, a group of artist friends gathered for drinks in Kunming in the dormitory room which the song and dance troupe had provided for Zhang Xiaogang. It was at the time of the campaign to “eliminate spiritual pollution”, but these “devils and demons” were still enjoying their decadent lifestyle: drinking, singing, dancing, and playing practical jokes. The carousing was so intense that Mao Xuhui and Zhang Xiaogang were getting obliviously drunk. By the New Year of 1984, Zhang Xiaogang’s continual drinking led to a total physical collapse. A few days later, he was admitted to the Kunming Chinese Medical Hospital with gastrointestinal bleeding. He spent two months in the hospital and continued to read voraciously, but at the same time he felt that during this time he had the opportunity to experience and observe the genuine states of the “soul”, “absurdity”, “mysteries”, and “death” described in books. He seemed to acquire an understanding of the basic human issues addressed by Western philosophers, from the following description of his encounters during this bout of illness:
During this time the conditions in which we lived grew more chaotic by the day, and regardless of our values, feelings and so on, we found ourselves consciously or unconsciously driven. I often found myself plunging into dilemmas. I had a sense that my inflated ego was falling into an abyss. I knew this wasn’t healthy, but I had no choice. Everyone got together to eat and drink; twice a week we drank a lot and once a week we would binge drink to excess. Sometimes I would wake up at midnight in despair and incomprehension. We may have thought of ourselves as martyrs for art, but perhaps we were not there yet and our bodies were being consumed by the flames we had lit.
By 1984, because of my long-term consumption of alcohol, my bowels totally ceased to function, and I would vomit even if I drank half a cup of milk, so I went into hospital. Perhaps it was Heaven’s way of granting me my wish of wanting to crawl into a quiet corner for some time and so I didn’t notify my friends about what had happened. During that time, I read to the point of exhaustion, and invariably I thought only of death every day. To me, life seemed meaningless, and death alone was something that was truly magnificent and worthy of praise. At that time I most admired Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Kafka, and I regarded them as my masters. When I finally checked into hospital, I was even secretly pleased that I was now closer to death.[17]
As the artist himself later said, fate had now given him an opportunity to “observe”, rather than simply read about or imagine, death. In March 1984, Zhang Xiaogang was discharged from hospital and returned to the hostel but found that a lot of things in his room had been stolen, added to which his parents had not been to the hospital to visit him during the Spring Festival holidays. He felt wretched and sad, and in this psychological state he completed a series of oil paintings based on the sketches he completed in hospital. Zhang Xiaogang, in his Autobiography (Zishu), describes very clearly his psychological processes after completing the sketches he made in hospital and the subsequent paintings:
One day the doctor asked me: “Do you have any special needs? You can tell me”. I said, “I’d like to see what people look like before they die”. And sure enough, one day the doctor came over and told me to come with him to an emergency room to see a critically ill patient. I didn’t recover my regular breathing for more than a day after I went to look.
...... As night fell, some very ill patients were howling like wolves in the wilderness, so the others often could not get to sleep. Whenever this happened, I would get cinematic flashbacks from books about life and death I had read over the past few years, with Nietzsche and El Greco rolled into one, white bed sheets fluttering on the ceiling at night, and creatures that were a mix of human and alien life forms. In that silent space, the meaning of life and of death would seem to interchange and validate each other, and we were merely rows of ghosts who had climbed onto the white beds.
One day, when I was as usual having difficulty getting up in the morning, the weather was clear and direct sunlight was flooding through the window and bearing down on the worn wooden floor. Unconsciously, I walked to the window and looked out at the morgue downstairs. Here one could often see trolleys being pushed in, with each body wrapped in shrouds. But today I saw an old lady downstairs hanging up bed sheets to dry. The white sheets were swinging with the light behind them and the old lady instinctively looked me in the eye; just as her wrinkled old dark face was silhouetted by a white sheet, I suddenly felt a frisson! I immediately had the urge to paint a series of works that would be a diary of the hospital. As I gradually began to move my pencil across a piece of white paper I had found, the provisional outline of a shape emerged and gradually, as though I was dreaming but remaining conscious, the picture emerged. I felt for the first time that I was beginning to go more deeply into modern art, into the explanation of life, into a meditation on death, and even into some eulogy ... ... From then on, “modern art” no longer felt like it was merely a formal style. If painting, for me, was primarily a narrative, then it must be the dramatization of an act of life and a meditation on death. We are all actors and even more so the audience. It is poetry that portrays images with light and images, dull purple.
I called my hospital sketches Ghosts between Black and White (Heibai zhi jian de youling); black and white were life and death, rationality and sensibility, inquiry and meditation. After leaving hospital, I closed my door to the world and dismissed my visitors. From the feelings of the hospital sketches, I painted a series of oil paintings called Ghosts Filled with Color (Chongman secai de youling). These were semi-abstract, semi-dreamlike, and semi-terrifying.
I felt that there was already a gap between what I had experienced and the things and the surrounding world I wanted to express; I could not even communicate with people, and could only share my loneliness with Kafka and Kierkegaard. Perhaps I had come to a dead end, but I thought these things might start to provide the timbre for many of my new works. Although they were obviously also influenced by the great masters, they were still excessively chaotic, overly vague, and superficial. But they gave me the perspective of an observer, and I began to learn how to experience and express things subjectively, and regardless of the topic, everything seemed to reveal my perception and prejudices about the world. During those years I found myself hovering between Expressionism and Surrealism, which split me asunder and occasioned great suffering. For a long time I needed to use those two legs to walk and I tried to reconcile these two alternatives, but the results were inevitably futile. It was only in 1994 that I was able to completely overcome this inner bifurcation.[18]
Harold Bloom identified three types of modern poetry: clouds, gulls, and skeptics. Wordsworth’s poetry belongs to the category of the clouds; skilled at introspection, it is concerned with personal subjectivity rather than the mighty ocean of the outside world. Shelley’s poetry belongs to the category of the gulls, being more fanciful, it is not concerned with the sea, but only with his own desires. Zhang Xiaogang was a mix of the categories of clouds and gulls, a blending of desire and subjectivity, so how could he find his real self? The will of the subjective self also wanted to establish itself finally. This marked a time lag between philosophy and aesthetics. In the West the worlds of philosophy and art had already entered the postmodern era; on encountering Western thinkers and artists who had already questioned, and even discarded, “subjectivity”, China, which had long remained closed, once again had become an “avant-garde” home of “experimentation”. He hovered indecisively between the different types of subjectivity of Expressionism and Surrealism, but both in fact served the creative artist’s supreme subjective self, so that the subject and the ego were most important and the outside world and its objectivity lost their primacy; what was expressed was no longer important but how expression became the entirety of art. All in all, his reading, his illness and his reveries were Zhang Xiaogang’s intellectual emancipation. For Zhang Xiaogang, the “wrinkled black face” silhouetted against the white sheet did not evoke the techniques of Luo Zhongli or Chuck Close; instead, the “old crone” with the extended hands was delineated like a deformed caricature and her exaggerated actions resembled those of a clown, against the backdrop of the flapping bed sheets. The sketches completed in hospital were all a true cerebral or inner record, and through his magically conjured up compositions Zhang Xiaogang attempted to depict the illusory and unconscious relationship between the patients and the sheets (White Sheets; Baise de chuangdan), the theme of the relationship between life and death (The Kiss of Two Ghosts; Liangge Youling zhi wen), and the relationship between doctors and patients (Queue of Patients; Bingren de hanglie). The themes of this group of sketches included patients’ encounters in hospital: the dispensary (Patients Receiving Medicine, number 5 in the series; Lingyao de renmen); nursing aides (Old Woman Washing Sheets, number 1; Xi chuangdan de laoyu); the wards (Two Patients Chatting, number 12; Liangge bingren de duihua); the hospital beds (The Insomnia of the Ghost: How Can a White Bed Be Your Beginning and Your End?, number 13; Yige shimian de linghua: Baise de chuang ni de kaishi he jiewei shi shenmeyang ne?); and, the mortuary (Two Ghosts Chatting, number 10; Liangge Youling de duihua). Moreover, all these works relate stories about the sleeplessness, hallucinations, and dreams inflicted on patients by their illnesses, and there is no “normality” to be found in them. However, for this young man enduring constant pain, groaning, and drawing close to death, his best course of action was to express the images that came to mind or even his fantasies. The complex and chaotic thoughts and hallucinations embodied sheets that transformed into ghosts or alien gypsies who transformed the hospital into a magical “Macondo”, in which the sheets came to life, dancing to the tune of the artist’s subconscious, becoming the garments that draped the ghosts, or becoming the objects on which patients depended or serving as boundaries between life and death. These complex and contradictory symbols served as props from hell.
The hospital at this time became just like the village of Macondo in Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and the Gypsies who came into the village to sell things saying that “all things are ghosts” in “Macondo” where everything that happened was weird, spiritual, and magical. Now, even the white sheets on the bed beneath the patient acquired a spiritual life and, under the direction of the artist’s banished subconscious, had their part to play in this surreal drama. In 1984 Zhang Xiaogang was already very familiar with styles of art ranging from Expressionism to Surrealism: he retained his yearning for quietude and the divine, still thought about love and tenderness, and contemplated God’s meekness and mercy, but reality presented him with excessive anxieties and dilemmas, and he believed that he was drowning in a morass from which he could not extricate himself. Perhaps, the creations of “Hermann Hesse” had already instructed this gentle young man and led him into the states of mind that he described at that time as “degeneracy” and “isolation”; there was nothing that could enable him to experience again the grasslands and even share that experience with friends. Spring had already past, and a hot and uncomfortable summer was approaching. The sun was no longer the sun that two or three years earlier had lit up the grasslands and the mountains of Guishan, but had now become a spiritually oppressive force. He had no work that suited him, no family to give him comfort, no opportunity to exhibit paintings, and not even any friends to whom he could open up. In the wake of the destruction wrought by alcohol and self indulgence, the only reality he could experience was inner solitude and exile. This sense of exile debilitated and dissipated his strength; it was only by observing and experiencing the underworld of hell that he could sober up, and only by encountering death that he could rediscover his life. Earlier, Zhang Xiaogang had read about all this in books, but only now that he was in hospital experiencing this authentic reality was he willing to accept it. Zhang Xiaogang was familiar with Freud’s theories on dream interpretation and his emphasis on the power of the subconscious mind, and was of course well aware of the obvious alacrity with which Surrealist painting had accepted new Freudian theories. Unlike his smaller works of 1983, the compositions that Zhang Xiaogang completed in hospital demonstrate assurance and firm judgment; his imagination and innate ability to depict and preserve a record of meditation and memory meant that each sketch was an integral conceptual image. The visual memories drawn from his experiences and deep feelings each recount a psychological story. Because these stories were no longer coming from Guishan or from everyday inspiration, it was only from late 1979 that Zhang Xiaogang could find his own technique drawing on what he understood of Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. What is interesting is that in several of his compositions we can also clearly see the influence of the Spanish painter El Greco, and in the works Doctor and Patient (Yisheng he bingren; Number 6 in the series) and Conversation between Two Patients (Liangge bingren de duihua; Number 12 in the series) the composition and atmosphere are very close to El Greco’s art. As early as late 1980, Zhang Xiaogang had seen an introduction to El Greco in the journal of Central Academy of Fine Arts titled World Art (Shijie meishu) The tortuously elongated and distorted forms and the mystical emotions depicted against black backgrounds of this Spanish painter amazed Zhang Xiaogang. In fact, the quality of the printing of early copies of this art magazine was not good and most of the works in its pages were simply black and white illustrations, but this Spanish artist, who preserved Byzantine artistic influences through the “Greeks” depicted by Titian and Tintoretto, presented a decadent mysticism in his works so different from that of Michelangelo which addressed Zhang Xiaogang’s needs. Almost instinctively, Zhang Xiaogang in the hospital felt at one with the diffused negativity that filled El Greco’s Toledo; everything in El Greco’s works spoke directly to Zhang Xiaogang’s feelings, so that he almost completely abandoned the realism of the characters, and turned directly to the ghosts in his hallucinations. Most of El Greco’s works are steeped in religious themes, although he always transplanted classical tragedies to reality, as in The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1588), a work whose religious feeling greatly influenced Zhang Xiaogang even though he was not a Christian and had no what in God; he gradually came to accept the emotional and spiritual timbre that he found in music like Mozart’s Requiem Mass. In The Ghost and His Goat (Youling he tade yang; Number16 in the series), Zhang depicts a goat that can no longer be understood simply as a memory of Guishan; the animal is placed together with the ghosts inhabiting hell, a symbolic object that no longer belongs to the natural world. Indeed, compositions such as Midnight Dream: Isn’t the Terror from the Abyss the Meaning of Existence? (Ziye de meng: Lai zi Shenyuan de kongbu bu zheng shi shengcun de yiyi ma?; Number 11 in the series) readily recall Cubist forms and techniques. However, the white sheets on the bed are so lonely and replete with spirituality that in almost every composition the white sheets play an important role and become a symbol of an abnormal psychological tendency that cannot be shaken off. We can see these sketches as the diary of an artist in hospital who, whenever some inner spiritual feeling or problematic core idea is stimulated, calmly records it; and given that he is in hospital, concerns about life, and themes of life and death are highlighted, as is clearly revealed in the following works: Farewell: Ghost Wandering on the Banks of the River Styx (Cibie: Yige Youling zai Minghe bian manyou; Number 8 in the series) and Farewell: A Ghost Faced with Two Choices: Look Back or Sail into the Stream of Oblivion (Cibie: Yige Youling mianlin zhe liangzhong xuanze: Huiwang huoshi chi xiang Wangchuan; Number 9). Zhang Xiaogang could not answer the questions which he was constantly contemplating and thinking about. In the hospital he often suffered from insomnia and during his sleepless nights he would decide on particular strokes and shapes to use to record his dreams that swirled around matters of life and death; many years later the artist still referenced these recognizable and persistent leitmotifs that structured the questions that concerned him. Zhang Xiaogang expressed it well when he said that he was also an actor who had built himself a stage so he could take part in the theatrical performance. The patients and ghosts sketches on paper were not only images to be used in his paintings, but were also psychological self-portraits of the artist. His friend Mao Xuhui said at an early date that these sketches of Zhang Xiaogang were “life states that took him to the works that were artistic states, and that in the states he painted was a suffering soul wrapped in a white sheet”. The “suffering” was of course no longer the shared suffering that formed the historical background hinted at in his fellow student Cheng Conglin’s works like A Summer Night in 1978 (1978 nian xiaye; painted in 1980) or Ship Crowded with Chinese Laborers (Huagong chuan; 1984), but an inner dilemma brought on by his loneliness; after the death of God and the failure of all idealism, the process of reflecting on problems of life and humanity produced overwhelming inner loneliness and distress. It is noteworthy that it is in the painting titled Farewell: A Ghost Faced with Two Choices: Look Back or Sail into the Stream of Oblivion that we first encounter the image of the Chinese equivalent of the River Lethe introduced for the first time in a work’s title. The appearance of this theme signifies that Zhang Xiaogang’s subconscious complex about “memory loss” and “memory” has risen to the surface level. He integrated the Greek legend of Lethe, the daughter of the goddess Eris, and the Chinese myth of Wangchuan, “the river of forgetfulness”, the river for testing forgetfulness to be found between the Yellow Springs and Hades. In this tragic and surreal space, a ghost clad in white is being urged by the god of death to farewell reality, but the ghost (the artist himself) is gazing with this head turned back, still emotionally attached to everything, but he is clinging to the huge paddlewheel of the boat (CHECK可是他掌着巨大、飞轮翅膀一样的双桨，), clearly reluctant to sail towards the “river of forgetfulness”.
In March, after Zhang Xiaogang returned to his now peaceful and quiet dormitory, he completed a number of oil paintings; although he was not following any strict plan for turning his sketches into paintings, in terms of theme and tone these paintings were not fundamentally different from his drawings. However, in the paintings the artist’s dream realms depicted with thick paint and colors were endowed with a disturbing atmosphere that evoked Hell, and these oil paintings were a clearer indication than the sketches that the spaces to accommodate these Chinese “ghosts” were provided by El Greco and the surrealist painter Dali. Of course, at the center of the composition of the work titled Midnight (Ziye), number 1 in the Colorful Ghosts series, the artist placed the body of a woman, and Hell he envisioned as desolation and emptiness; this woman had become the object of his desire and, at this time, he was now hoping to find love and comfort.
Many years later, when Zhang Xiaogang was copying Baudelaire’s poems into his diary once again, he said that at this time in the 1980s, Baudelaire and others “had become my best friends”. Indeed, in the years when Communist values were being abandoned, what are were the intellectual and emotional pillars that supported young rebels? How were personal ideals to be achieved? Melancholy itself seemed so attractive! Indeed, Baudelaire “bewitched” Zhang Xiaogang:
On the pillow of evil Satan, Trismegist,
Incessantly lulls our enchanted minds.
(The Flowers of Evil, To the Reader)
It was Baudelaire’s poems that initiated Zhang Xiaogang’s profound quest and questioning of his own existence, bringing the consciousness of this young man to more basic yet more abstract questions:
“Whom do you love most? Are they the same”, you ask: “Father, mother, sister or a brother?”
“I have no father, no mother, no sister, or brother”.
“A friend?”
“You use a word, but I still don’t know its meaning”.
“Your homeland?”
“I still do not know where that is”.
“Beauty?”
“I truly love her, she is a goddess, a flower that has not withered”.
“Gold”?
“I hate it, just as you hate God”.
“Oh, Oh! So whom do you love? Some stranger from foreign parts?”
“I love the clouds ... ... the passing clouds ... ... Over there, and over there ... ... wonderful clouds!”[19]
Such questions were the corollary of his memories of early encounters and would trouble Zhang Xiaogang for many years to come. Baudelaire belonged to a society making the transition from classicism to modernity who felt that only after the soul had endured suffering and defeat could a person realize his or her ideals: Paris was ugly, the people had narcotized themselves, debauchery and death were eulogized and even sought after; evil was ubiquitous, and the poet and artist could only wander in the midst of evil, and experience love, decadence, despair, and even death before being able to attain liberation. Zhang Xiaogang’s doppelganger companions who spent their time in his dormitory room drinking, arguing, and singing, accepted Baudelaire’s vision as a lifestyle and simply transformed Kunming into a faux-Paris; given Kunming’s French architectural heritage and enduring symbols, they constructed an imaginary Parisian-style “hell”, but they loved this hell filled with art and possibilities, even if it was only alcohol that could sustain the vision of a libertine’s artistic paradise they conjured up when they were profoundly inebriated and in their cups. Zhang Xiaogang loved the visions manifested in the dreamscapes and imaginary worlds he constructed after painting his Demons (Mogui) series. However, in the final analysis it was “loneliness” that remained the companion of “Zhang Xiaogang”, because the “melancholy of Montmartre” ultimately demanded that they have ideals; as an individual, Zhang Xiaogang was fascinated by the ocean, but the mighty sea was also the setting of painful struggle and lamentation. Baudelaire described how the sea with its eternal waves will always be loved by the free man, but the world of the soul is itself a profundity of anguish (Flowers of Evil, “The Man and the Sea”). This mode of thinking and imagining was spiritual opium for Zhang Xiaogang in the 1980s. In 1984 Zhang Xiaogang recorded, in the form of notes, his understanding of life at this time, and his words are strongly reminiscent of Baudelaire’s style:
Please play upon your lute and sing a wondrous ode for death, the devil said.
Do you think you see the red moon rising briefly just as dawn will break? No, what I want to praise is that wondrous existence that lies between life and death, the ghost answered.
Zhang Xiaogang enlisted his “ghosts” in his discussions of dreams and maladies, life and death. He felt that when he had been confined to that white bed and abandoned himself to the twilight zone between life and death, he understood the reasons for dreaming. In the sea of the subconscious that underlies people’s lives, life and death are locked in confrontation; only when an individual becomes aware of this struggle is it possible to perceive and experience the existence of love, and the meaning of life. Perhaps it was Sartre’s insistence that absurdity and nothingness constitute the meaning of life which is rendered even more absurd by disease, which convinced Zhang Xiaogang that with the onset of illness, one could discover in which precise aspects the decay within life was to be discovered. This was an era that was foundering and in which solitude is essential, but “the abyss of loneliness makes us realize more profoundly the meaning of transcendence, and once we know how to rely on our loneliness, the world also begins to take on a whole new meaning for us”. Zhang Xiaogang’s reasoning readily evokes Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, with its references to melancholy and ideals, the atmosphere of Paris, and to the logic of “wine”, “evil’s florescence”, “rebellion”, and “death”:
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who of Death, your mistress old and strong,
Have begotten Hope, — a charming madcap!
Reading these lines, Zhang Xiaogang fell under the spell of Satan, who he variously described as “the devil”, a “ghost”, or a “demon”. Once we enter the artist’s mental context at this time, we are able to better appreciate the ultimate source of his demons. Therefore, the artist referred to his work in 1984-1985 as his “period of ghosts” or his “period of demons”.
In 1984, the focus of attention in the art world was an exhibition being organized by the Chinese Artists’ Association, given that this would be the only opportunity for artists to exhibit their work. All artists at that time were subject to many layers of screening if they were to be allowed to participate in an officially organized art exhibition which was of course also the only sanctioned outlet for their art. Participation in the Sixth National Fine Arts Exhibition to be held later in that year was even the goal of the rebel artists of Kunming. In the period when artists were creating works in preparation for the exhibition, Zhang Xiaogang went to Chongqing, to find out what his friends were painting for the national exhibition. When he was there, he naturally also took the opportunity to attend Ye Yongqing and Fu Liya’s simple wedding. In Chongqing Zhang saw the oil painting Ye Yongqing had prepared for the show titled Shepherd Sisters from the Sani Village (Muyang cun de Sani jiemei) which depicted the scenery of Guishan in a manner suggestive of Italian painting of the early Renaissance. Zhang Xiaogang would prepare two works for the national exhibition: Daughter of the Mountain (Shan de nü’er) and Evening Breeze (Wan feng). In the end, Evening Breeze would be included in another exhibition organized by the Yunnan Provincial Artists Association. Unlike the works he had recently completed on the themes of “disease”, “loneliness”, and “death”, Evening Breeze retained a glimmer of the atmosphere of the pastoral idyll that imbued his earlier work. It is clear that in order to participate in the national fine arts exhibition, Zhang also had to restrain his attention to an inner sense of life’s absurdity and decadence and also protect his work by presenting the officials with a healthy aesthetic perspective for them to assess his entries. The exhibition also attracted Mao Xuhui who had already produced two classically expressionist paintings titled Love (Ai) and Red Bulk (Hongse tizhi), which he submitted together with his more accessible and acceptable Red Earth Road (Hong tulu) from his Guishan series. However, eventually, three works of his were judged to be “decadent” and were not accepted for the national art exhibition. Unlike several years previously when the “scar art” from Sichuan was officially favored, the artists who lived and created in the Southwest realized that the spirit of the years around 1980 was gone; it was now difficult to have their work officially accepted, and judging by the themes, styles, and intellectual tendencies of the works selected for inclusion in the national art exhibition, they felt that their own paintings that exemplified an alternate taste would never have much of a chance of being displayed at any official art exhibition.
We can imagine how young artists at that time found it hard to accept that they could be excluded from national art exhibitions. With their hopes finally dashed, they found themselves in a quandary. Zhang Xiaogang was staying at home painting somewhat aimlessly, so he could agree to go to Jinning County, where he had spent time as an “educated youth”, to teach in the local cultural center’s art training classes; the song and dance troupe, to which he was attached, rarely performed, and so in the second half of 1984, he also went to Shenzhen with the husband and wife couple, Su Jianghua and Yang Huangli, to work with Liu Shaohui, an artist from Yunnan who was now the Chief Designer at the Shenzhen University Art Center. There Zhang Xiaogang worked on the construction of Dai bamboo houses as part of a cultural tourism project for more than two months before he was fired and sent back to Kunming. Waiting to meet him at the railway station was Mao Xuhui, eager to find out what Shenzhen was like as an environment for artists, but the fact that Zhang Xiaogang was returning flat broke meant that another dream – whether about making money or art – was shattered.
In the first half of 1985, to make a living and earn money for future exhibitions, Zhang Xiaogang went with Mao Xuhui and Pan Dehai to work for the Nanbao Art Company which had been set up by a mutual friend. There he painted a number of murals and did the design for some decorating projects. However, life in the company did not interest Zhang Xiaogang, and the erratic and unreliable income exhausted him. Eventually, Zhang Xiaogang totally dropped the idea of “getting rich”, and realized that painting was the only thing he wanted to do. Painting for Zhang was the only possibility. In a letter to a friend (9 May), he complained that the company had not earned much money and if it were to make a profit the relationships there would become uncomfortable. In discussing participation in an exhibition to be held in Shanghai in which the artists would have to fund themselves, he said that his art would at least “have the chance to see the light of day”. In any case, he was still yearning to return to his alma mater and wanted to paint in a purely academic setting, but despite his contacts among fellow students and teachers at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts and having spent some time with Ye Yongqing at his home in Chongqing, he found no opportunity to go back to school. Eventually, he submitted a brief report to his song and dance ensemble asking that they allow him to do further study at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts:
Recently I received a letter from my alma mater saying that it had made a place available for an external student to undertake high-level continuing studies at the school. I really hope to be able to go back to the school and now that the school has also established a new teacher training department, in view of the scarcity of trained teachers, I feel I can both study there and give lessons. This would cut costs for the academy and they could pay me a base salary. I would tentatively schedule for one semester (beginning in September), and if the unit consents I would prepare what I used to teach. For me, this is a very rare opportunity which I would like to discuss with our leaders, in the hope that they would understand my specific situation and agree to my request.[20]
He wrote this letter in the summer of 1985, but that summer perhaps radically changed Zhang’s future, because his participation in the self-funded exhibition that he mentioned in Shanghai would eventually sweep this psychologically complex and sensitive young man into a major trend in art, which the Beijing art critic Gao Minglu would see as part of a movement of avant-garde art groups and their exhibitions and activities scattered in different cities that he named the “85’ Art Movement”.
“The New Figuratives”
Perhaps it was because of their subject matter that the murals at Beijing Capital Airport titled Water Splashing Festival: Hymn to Life and unveiled on 26 September 1979 had a special impact on the artists of Kunming, where the images of the naked Dai women depicted in the paintings also aroused controversy and debate. At almost the same time, on 27 September the Stars Art Exhibition opened in the small park on the eastern side of the China Art Gallery, later to be called the National Art Museum of China. Even though the exhibition was closed down on its second day, the modernist style of the works in the “Stars Exhibition” and the street demonstration calling for artistic freedom staged by the participating artists exerted an enormous influence on society. This happened to be a brief period in which “democracy” was fully legitimate and people felt a sense of hope because of the Stars exhibition. Subsequently, a number of artists from Yunnan painted works that were used to decorate the Yunnan Room in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People: Yao Zhonghua’s Yulong Jinchuan; Jiang Tiefeng’s Spring Morning in the Stone Forest (Shilin chunxiao); Ding Shaoguang’s Xishuangbanna Dawn (Xishuangbanna chenxi); Yuan Xiaocen’s Peacock (Kongque); Wang Jinyuan’s Tropical Flowers and Birds (Redai huaniao); Li Zhongxiang’s West Mountain and Dianchi Lake (Xishan Dianchi); and Jia Guozhong’s The Three Pagodas of Dali (Dali santa). Moved and inspired by the Stars Art Exhibition in the small square outside the National Art Museum of China, in early 1980 Yao Zhonghua, together with other painter friends including Ding Shaoguang, Wang Jinyuan, Liu Shaohui, and Jiang Tiefeng, discussed setting up a painting association to be called the “Shen Society”. In the summer of 1980 the Shen Society staged its Inaugural Exhibition of Paintings by the Shen Society in the Yunnan Provincial Museum. The manifesto of the “Shen Society” embodied the characteristic spirit of that open period, far removed from the familiar language and themes of official exhibitions:
The Shen Society was born at the beginning of the 1980s, in the geng-shen year —— the Year of the Metal Monkey. The Metal Monkey —— is the incarnation and embodiment of the pursuit of truth, loyalty, wisdom, courage, and liveliness, as well as being the incarnation of the ideals of the people. We use it as the symbol of our Shen Society. On the tortuous and troubled road, may the spirit, qualities, and talent confer on our generation the responsibility which history has entrusted to us. We are well aware that if there are no breakthroughs in theory, then there will be no new creative practice. If there is no brave exploration and practice, everything is just empty talk. The essence of art is creation and without creation, art is dead. The quality of artistic style is determined by the artist’s morality and personality, and through perseverance we enter the soul and essence of painting – to achieve this, we need to learn, to think, to make comparisons, and to engage in practice.
Although the works of some of these artists such as Jiang Tiefeng drew on the richly colored decorative style said to characterize the “Yunnan school of painting” which would subsequently lose all meaning and simply become commercial, the attitude behind the art exhibitions of the Shen Society and its artists ultimately transcended earlier official demands to paint themed realist painting, and so they stimulated the creative impulse of much younger artists.
Seine at Pont Mirabeau bridge flows
Our love
Do I have to remember?
When pain always comes after earlier joy
The night bell sounds
Time passes and I am still here
We were face to face
Holding hands
Beneath the bridge I touch
My tired eye flickers
Night Bell
The night bell sounds
Time passes and I am still here
Love passes like the river’s flow
Love is lost
Life slows down
Despite hopes so strong
The night bell sounds
Time passes and I am still here
How many days or weeks have passed?
The days now past
Are, with the love, not coming back
The Seine beneath Pont Mirabeau flows away
The night bell sounds
Time passes and I am still here.
[Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Et nos amours
Faut-il qu'il m'en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine
Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure
Les mains dans les mains restons face à face
Tandis que sous
Le pont de nos bras passe
Des éternels regards l'onde si lasse
Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure
L'amour s'en va comme cette eau courante
L'amour s'en va
Comme la vie est lente
Et comme l'Espérance est violente
Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure
Passent les jours et passent les semaines
Ni temps passé
Ni les amours reviennent
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure]
[James Kirkup translation:
The Seine keeps flowing
under the Mirabeau Bridge -
and our loves also -
I need to remember that
joy always follows sorrow.
And when night's bell tolls
the days take their departure -
I alone remain
Holding hand in hand,
let us sit face to face while
underneath the bridge
of our arms pass eternal
gazing on such weary waves.
And when nights bell tolls
the days take their departure -
I alone remain
Love is flowing fast
away, just as these flowing
waters flow away
slow as life itself flows by -
how violent Hope becomes.
And when the night's bell tolls
the days take their departure -
I alone remain
The days passing by,
the weeks passing by - and yet
neither our past time
nor our loves return - under
Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine -
And when night s bell tolls
the days take their departure -
I alone remain]
For the young modernists of Kunming, the Seine in these lines of Apollinaire’s poem Le Pont Mirabeau evoked the moat of Kunming known as the Panlong River, the banks of which were lined with buildings in foreign architectural styles where the French and other Europeans had once lived. In the 1980s, the “Seine” signified France, modern art, and an utterly new. Guillaume Apollinaire was intimately involved with modern art; Picasso and other artists were his friends and Apollinaire was the first to use the word “surrealism”. Apollinaire, the Mirabeau Bridge, the River Seine, and an art movement in an age of rapid change became visually and spiritually intertwined with the Panlong River in Kunming for the city’s artists. Zhang Xiaogang’s dormitory room was located among the French-style buildings with their yellow walls, red tiles, and green windows on the banks of the Panlong, for which reason the room where he and his friends congregated was called “the Left Bank dormitory”. Ten years later, Mao Xuhui would emotionally describe how Kunming’s deep moat was a symbol of those times:
There was also Kunming’s Red Sun Square and the Moat, the Panlong River, which we called “the Seine” after we had been drinking. It was this dirty and smelly river that passed through the city that in those years made us think of Paris; we would think of those groups of artists who lived in Paris but also never realized their ambitions --- Modigliani who died from an excess of alcohol and the neurotic Soutine; we thought of Picasso who in his “blue period” lived in the “bateau-lavoir” [“boat wash-house”] apartments; and we thought of Toulouse-Lautrec’s Montmartre with its can-can dancing girls and their clients. There was also the Paris where Hemingway wrote “The Sun Also Rises”, the Paris where Somerset Maugham once dreamed that he was an artist, the Paris where Diaghelev’s Ballets Russes performed ... At that time whenever we dreamed of this river that had accompanied us since childhood (with the many French-style buildings and French plane trees along its banks), we would also commune with that glorious and light-filled metropolis of art, Paris, that city of romance and melancholy, with its all-night smoke-filled cafés and its absinthe bars.[21]
Thus was perpetuated a bitter-sweet dream of willed self-indulgence. Despite his stay in hospital, Zhang Xiaogang did not give up drinking. He and his friends continued to go to the “boat wash-house” bars to pursue their Montparnasse-style nightlife, but the bars were in their dormitories and the music came from their own guitars or from scratchy tape recorders. They discussed their personal “bittersweet suffering”, “depression”, and “tragedy”; because the Artists Association not taking their art seriously, society was naturally also unaware of their existence. But, after reading Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, they would discuss how to confront the dilemma presented by the death of God. Mao Xuhui said that their own parents at that time well might regard them as “dead ugly” because they dressed differently from most other people with their long hair and flares, but when these youths from the Academy entered society they discovered that the “venerated” Artists Association and the official art academies refused to accept them outright and regarded them as unhealthy and disobedient rebels. This drove them to retreat into their own inner worlds that they could at least control. As a senior cadre who had emerged from the Communist Party’s military, Zhang Jing regarded the free and loose lifestyle of his son with revulsion in light of his attitudes which had long ago hardened. For a Communist Party cadre in the 1980s, there was something dishonorable about one’s offspring going into “business”. Therefore, Zhang Xiaogang’s experiences in working in companies in Shenzhen and in Kunming only increased the fear, mistrust, and estrangement that existed between father and son; for this stereotypically strict father, his third son was treading an unorthodox and dangerous road. However, he identified the devil incarnate in all of this as coming from Wagner, Munch, and a mishmash of Western ideas and stories. In November 1984, Shanghai Translation Publishing House published the veteran translator Zhu Weizhi’s version of Milton’s Paradise Lost, and in the first half of the following year Zhang Xiaogang’s bought this heroic epic illustrated with etchings by the French artist Gustave Doré; it resonated perfectly with the inner world of Zhang Xiaogang: the transformations between heaven and hell and the epic struggles with demons, Zhang at this time having not yet escaped from his “period of ghosts”. Zhang Xiaogang probably had little patience with the overarching allegory of the book and did not remember all the stories from the epic, but Milton’s use of the story of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit further reinforced Zhang Xiaogang’s rebellious attitude. In the same way that Milton’s focus was not on the ancient canonical text, Zhang Xiaogang was only concerned with the fate of Adam and Eve after they were expelled from Eden, because that situation reminded him of his own fate and that of his artist friends who loved art but found they were not understood. At the same time, Satan and his army of demons created by Milton for the epic struggle with God aptly portrayed the artist’s rebellion against society and authority; in the eyes of the young Zhang Xiaogang, although the life of paradise lost entailed much pain it also conferred genuine freedom, the ability to doubt, and the dignity to fight, which was far more important than a comfortable life; the freedom to act compensated for all that was lost. At this time, the ideas and works of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Hermann Hesse, Saul Bellow, Henri Bergson, and Ernest Hemingway, as well as of Wagner, Stravinsky, Picasso, Sartre, El Greco, Munch, Husserl, Kafka, and Kokoschka, not to mention Bergmann, Pink Floyd, Bartók, Strindberg, T. S. Eliot, Marquez, and Beckett, were bandied around at all their gatherings, whenever the subconscious yearnings and desires hidden in the depths of the human heart were completely and fully mobilized. So, in comparing Adam and Eve before and after they ate the forbidden fruit, while they could have attained Adam and Eve’s earlier innocence and health, they preferred to explore life’s suffering and dilemmas and even assume that death itself could be seen as the “door to eternal life”. This intellectual transvaluation structured the values shared by these young artists who had been banished from Eden so that even in the paintings by young artists they had never met, they immediately recognized friends they felt they had known for many years.
At a time when they were looking for true friends and comrades and given that society and even their families rejected their art, they all believed that only by banding together with like-minded young artists would they be able to hold out, find encouragement, and adhere to their ideals. Painting the landscapes of “Barbizon” (Guishan), helping each other and discussing life in the banks of the “Seine” (Kunming’s ancient moat), and living their music- and alcohol-fueled bittersweet and romantic lives of fantasy in their “Left Bank hostel” (Zhang Xiaogang’s house) helped them become brothers and sisters. They agreed that the red clay, the flocks of goats and the spring blossoms on pear trees beneath the bright blue skies created a rhapsodically poetic atmosphere; they also evoked the Bohemian lifestyle of artists and poets in Paris and talked with great relish of Montparnasse’s “boat wash houses”. These were basically the reasons why these young artists got together and eventually took the step of travelling all the way to Shanghai to organize their own exhibition. When they read the following verse in the newly published collection of Nietzsche’s poems, it was as though the great master was personally drawing their attention to the need to understand and explore themselves:
Life is a mirror
In which you know yourself,
I’ll make it my priority,
Even if I finally die!
However, as every evening approached and they once again realized that they had no way to get society to understand their art, they would fall back on their feverish explanations, copious drinking, and wild dancing, after which they would collapse, feeling irritated, disoriented, delirious, bilious, and depressed, until the sun rose again the next day. Mao Xuhui described this pattern in his “Reminiscences of the New Figuratives” (Huiyi “Xin Juxiang”):
At that time society could not endorse us, so our only recourse was to search for what was real and tangible in our own hearts. We could only experience things for ourselves and in our own way. We had to grasp life and feel empowered through that experience, even though it entailed great pain and stress, chaos and madness. These bitter experiences almost become the source of our work in those years. Both as artists and as people, we should have been grateful for life, because it allowed us to be the people we ought to become.[22]
The ideas and emotions of these rebels radically deviated from official ideological propaganda and demands placed on the arts. The artistic criteria of the Artists Association almost completely crushed the possibility of the art of these young artists, allegedly contaminated by Western values, ever being exhibited. Officialdom could adjust the ever-changing vocabulary that framed literary and artistic standards but these standards were immutably based on the basic tenor of Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” (Yan’an Wenyi Gongzuo Zuotanhui shang de jianghua) delivered in 1942 and reiterated in official documents and speeches at different times thereafter. In the more than thirty years after 1949, people’s thinking was thoroughly steeped in the “spirit” of the Yan’an Forum, and most literary and artistic workers could even recite passages from the “Talks”, such as the following: “In today’s world all culture, all literature, and all art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, or art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, ‘cogs and wheels’ in the whole revolutionary machine”. It was this attitude of Mao Zedong in particular that instilled terror and paranoia into Chinese writers and artists for decades:
The works of those who praise the glories of the bourgeoisie are not necessarily great and the works of those who delineate the dark deeds of the bourgeoisie are not necessarily worthless, but the works of those who praise the glories of the proletariat are necessarily great and the works of those who delineate the ‘dark deeds’ of the proletariat are necessarily worthless. Is this not a fact in the history of literature and art? As for the people, the creators of the world’s human history, why would we not praise them? And why would we not praise the proletariat, the Communist Party, New Democracy, and socialism?
On the basis of these criteria, while Mao’s Talks might have been delivered several decades previously, “Talks” remained the only legitimate criteria and the sole reference for official art bodies in China, and so art influenced by thinkers and artists from bourgeois countries could naturally never be approved or selected by an official art institution. These criteria were not spelled out in the general media, but the system implemented monitoring and controls, and young artists were well aware of the intangible pressure brought to bear on new art, and given that they had lost any trust or reliance on the “hegemonic” official Artists Association, young artists could only rely on their own strength and solidarity, pool together every cent of their own resources, and rely on their own common will, to fulfill the target of holding their own exhibitions. In early 1985, Zhang Long, a student from Kunming studying at Shanghai’s East China Normal University returned to Kunming for the winter vacation. After seeing paintings by Zhang Xiaogang, Mao Xuhui, and Pan Dehai, Zhang Long was very excited and told his friends in Kunming that paintings by Shanghai artists were “too sweet and pedestrian”. He said that after he returned to Shanghai he would look for a space where artists from Kunming could stage a collective exhibition.
Zhang Xiaogang’s troubled times continued and he was spending more than ten hours a day working on the large-scale sculptural project. In a letter written on 9 May he mentioned towards the end of the letter that he had sent works off to Shanghai two days previously, but he was still stuck at the beginning of a project, and that he would have to content himself with whatever slim pleasure or sense of accomplishment he derived by bringing his design for the sculpture to realization. In fact, his involvement in this project to earn money, the constraints on travel from having no money and his anxious wait to hear from Ye Yongqing whether or not he had an opportunity to return to the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts left him without the ability or inclination to go ahead to Shanghai with Mao Xuhui and Pan Dehai, and so even the exhibition opening would be a very constrained affair. But many years later, Zhang Xiaogang said that he often did not attend exhibition openings, and a much deeper reason for this would seem to be that he suffered anxiety and a nameless dread that left him afraid of being at exhibitions because his shyness made him tense. In his letter he referred to the exhibition by the name it would become written up in art history, the “New Figurative Painting Exhibition”. He recalled in his Autobiography:
On a spring day in 1985, I received a letter from Zhang Long, a painter friend from Kunming who was a student at East China Normal University in Shanghai, and he said we could stage an exhibition at our own expense in the Cultural Hall belonging to Shanghai’s Jing’an District government and we would be free to choose what we put in the exhibition. He asked what we thought and so I took the letter to Mao Xuhui whose eyes lit up after reading the letter and he simply said, “Let’s do it!” I have always been lazy and I find making contacts very troublesome, so Mao Xuhui initiated the contacts with Shanghai; the main person in Shanghai involved in the planning, apart from Zhang Long, was Hou Wenyi, a woman artist. I remember that when she wrote to me, she mentioned that she had titled the exhibition the “New Figuratives” in her proposal.[23]
Zhang Xiaogang, who was busy with Ma Xiangsheng and some other friends on the sculptural work, was not able to devote more time to preparations for the exhibition and that job was naturally taken up by Mao Xuhui. When Zhang Long had earlier offered to find space for the exhibition, the artists decided that they needed to get an immediate start on their exhibition:
So their most urgent task was earning some money. To that end they [Zhang Xiaogang and Pan Dehai] got involved with an interior decoration company and engaged in remodeling houses and drawing up plans. They put in a great deal of effort, but made little money. Then the telegram came from Shanghai. As the exhibition venue had been arranged, they had to act quickly and would have to borrow money. Pan borrowed 600, Mao borrowed 300, and Zhang borrowed 200. The three of them packed their paintings into eight crates and made two trips on a tricycle to the railway station to arrange their shipment. Due to the urgency, they used the express service, which cost them more than 400 in shipping fees. Both Pan and Mao asked their bosses for leave of absence before they went to Shanghai for the exhibition, but Zhang was trapped in Kunming working. They had to do everything related to the show, such as painting the advertisements, printing invitations, placing ads in newspapers, moving and hanging the paintings, and decorating the venue. At night they slept in the student dormitory or classrooms at East China Normal University’s Fine Arts Department, and they had to evade the questions of campus security every day. Their leisure time on campus in the evenings was spent in the university’s beverage lounge where jazz and coffee were provided.[24]
In a memoir of 1987, Mao Xuhui left a complete record of the first “New Figurative Painting Exhibition”, and he described how the name “new figurative” was first proposed by Hou Wenyi, a painter who participated in the exhibition and who had graduated from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, and how “everyone had agreed intuitively” to her suggestion.[25] In 1996 Mao described the whole history of the “New Figurative” show and the context of the period. The “New Figurative Painting Exhibition” opened on 22 June 1985 in Shanghai’s Jing’an District Cultural Center. The exhibition invitations gave the names of the participating artists: Hou Wenyi, Zhang Long, Mao Xuhui, Zhang Xiaogang, Pan Dehai, and Xu Kan.
The preface for the exhibition expressed a very general view of art: “Above all these works shock the soul, rather than please the eye or play with color and composition”. This attitude somewhat alarmed the audience, in addition to which the works in the exhibition were mostly modern and expressionist in style, rarely seen in Shanghai; some people were even worried that the show might be closed down, the precedent being an exhibition of abstract paintings at Fudan University that had been shut down previously. At the opening of the show, some artists of the older generation, including Guan Liang and Ah Da, came to give Mao Xuhui their deep encouragement. On the day the Shanghai exhibition closed, a female poet from Sweden called Zhang Zhen who visited the show proposed that the exhibition go on to Nanjing, and she gave them 150 yuan. With the help of friends in Nanjing, the exhibition re-opened on 16 July in the Health Education Hall at the Nanjing Museum opened again, where Zhang Zhen also gave a poetry reading.
Unlike earlier groups and styles generated by the art community of Kunming, the “New Figurative” members, despite their different styles, exhibited a tendency towards expressionism that was strongly influenced by modern Western artists, and they completely rejected the earlier “Yunnan School of painting” and other types of painting that emphasized form; they regarded inner freedom of expression as the starting point for art. Mao Xuhui regarded the works of several of the major artists producing “New Figurative” paintings between 1982 and 1985 as responses to the influence and guidance of Western thinkers and artists for whom inner feelings were the highest form of truth:
As our response, we devoted a great deal of individual effort to producing a large number of works in those years. The dormitory rooms of Zhang Xiaogang, Pan Dehai and myself were all filled with paintings. Our living space was getting increasingly compressed by all this creative output. Our rooms were always filled with a smell that blended primed canvases, pigments, turpentine, tobacco, rat droppings, and mildew. The moment we received our monthly salaries, by the time we had bought books and paint, we had little money left to look after ourselves and our families.[26]
Zhang Xiaogang wanted to exhibit his 1981 Grasslands (Caoyuan zhuhua) graduation paintings and the Demons (Mogui) series of 1984, two sets of works that encompassed his entire output from graduation to the time of his hospitalization and his final completion of the Demons (Mogui) [ARE THE MOGUI AND YOULING SERIES ONE AND THE SAME?] series, but one can readily imagine how at that time Zhang Xiaogang’s energies were sapped by the dilemma of having to make a living but not knowing what to do. He was an adolescent who remained confused yet was unconsciously driven; in the period after he left the relatively simple environment of college, his artistic ideals now faced serious setbacks from society. Zhang Xiaogang now most needed comfort, care and actual help, but Mao Xuhui and Pan Dehai were in Shanghai and Nanjing caught up in the hectic excitement of organizing the exhibition, and when they eventually returned to Kunming exhausted and disappointed, and feeling the whole thing had been an absurd exercise,[27] Zhang Xiaogang who had been simply waiting for his friends to come back to Kunming so he could share in their excitement, found that all his joy had waned.
For those who participated in the rise of modernist art, 1985 was a highly memorable year. In January, the radical magazine Art Trends (Meishu sichao) was founded in Hubei, and for several years thereafter, this publication became the major forum for presenting the ideas of many of the leading modernist artists and critics; in March, Li Zhengtian, a teacher at the Fine Arts Research Institute at the Guangzhou Institute of Art, and a number of students organized an Art Theory Study Association that conducted experimental and theoretical art activities; in April, China Art Academy’s Fine Arts Institute and several other art institutions organized an “oil painting seminar” in Jingxian, Anhui province, at which a number of artists and theorists began to stress the question of updating art concepts; in May, at the fourth national congress of the China Artists Association, Hua Junwu in his report titled “Unite to Work Hard and Create a New Situation in Art” raised the question of reforming the work of the Artists Association; in the same month, exemplifying modernist trends, the “Progressive Chinese Youth Art Exhibition” opened at the China Art Gallery (now NAMOC) in Beijing, at which Meng Luding and Zhang Qun’s hyper-realist style work, In the New Age (Zouxiang xin shidai), challenged the comfort zones of many in the audience; in June, China Art News (Zhongguo meishu bao) was founded and this journal would go on to report developments in new art and art thought in China; in July, Li Xiaoshan, a graduate of Nanjing Academy of Fine Arts, published an article in Jiangsu Art Monthly (Jiangsu Huakan) titled “My View of Chinese-style Painting” that provoked misplaced furor and outrage among the art establishment for its statement that “Chinese-style art had already reached the end of its days”; in September, an exhibition of French Impressionists and early 20th century modernist works was held in Beijing; in October, a large modern art exhibition titled Jiangsu Youth Art Week was staged at the Jiangsu Art Gallery in Nanjing, and surrealist works and works that expressed anger or confusion by Ding Fang, Guan Ce, Shen Qin, Ren Rong, and Xu Yihui shocked audiences; in November, the journal Painters was founded in Hunan, and on 18 November the opening of the “International Touring Exhibition of Rauschenberg’s Works” allowed Chinese modern artists to understand for the first time the shift from modernism to post-modernism; in December, the “85 New Space Exhibition” opened in Hangzhou, the “Hunan Zero Group” emerged in Changsha and, on the last day of the year, Liu Chun, Song Yongping, Qu Yan, and others participated in a modernist performance art work in Taiyuan. Until 1986, modern art events and groups in different cities assumed whatever form possible, and the various exhibitions, seminars, and magazines articles constituted an art movement that came to be called the “85’ art trend” (this term for the art phenomena of the period was coined by the art critic Gao Minglu at the Chinese “National Oil Painting Art Seminar” held in April 1986). It can be imagined that given the concern and interest that Gao Minglu, as editor of China Art News, expressed in the concepts of art expressed in Mao Xuhui’s “New Figurative” paintings, Gao Minglu issued an invitation to Mao to attend the “China 85 Youth Art Thought Large-Scale Touring Slideshow Exhibition and Academic Seminar” held in July 1986 in Zhuhai. [28] This conference brought together all New Wave artists and critics from cities across China to exchange creative experiences and ideas, and for some key people such as the critic Gao Minglu, and the artists Shu Qun and Wang Guangyi, this event can be regarded as a modernist carnival, and at least at this time, those arts organizations and artists constantly writing and issuing art manifestos, it represented the coming of a new era in art. The major artist of the Northern Art Group Wang Guangyi would publish the following ebullient statement in the following year in the first issue of Art Trends:
Today the time has come to proclaim the inner drive which is the vital force behind culture. We yearn “to look upon all forms of life vigorously and joyfully”, in order to establish a new and more human spiritual mode that will foster more orderly progress in life. For this reason, we oppose that morbid and terminal rococo-style art and all that is unhealthy and non-conducive to the evolution of life, because such “art” can only foster the growth of human weakness, distancing people from health and life from its essence; the clamor raised by this morbidly terminal art will prevent those healthy people from heeding the heavy and solemn knell coming from within life’s inner impulse.[29]
This exaggerated and Nietzschean statement embodies a dissatisfaction with Expressionism, but at that time modernism was a subjective concept of rebellion, one temporarily accepted by all rebels who would if they could—in the not too distant future, gradually reduce contact with those whose artistic thought was different, but who were for the moment all participants in a confederation of sorts. Mao Xuhui was concerned that modernism advance and, enthused by the atmosphere of the Conference, began preaching to his friends in Kunming after returning home about the message delivered by the Zhuhai Conference: it seemed that a massive revolution had started and he hoped that his friends in Kunming would become active and take part in this rapidly developing art revolution that was sweeping the nation.[30] Mao Xuhui, together with Zhang Xiaogang, Zhang Long, Ye Yongqing, Pan Dehai, Qu Wei, Sun Guojuan, Zhang Xiaping, Su Jianghua, Yang Huangli and partner, Mao Jie, and the theorist Deng Qiyao, could no longer contain their passion and attempted to bring the atmosphere of modernism from other cities to Kunming, where they decided to organize their own salon, named the “Southwestern Art Research Group”. Shortly thereafter, on 26 October 1986, the “Third Slide Show and Treatise Exhibition of New Figurative Works” opened in the Yunnan Provincial Library, and the organizers wrote ambitiously in the introductory text of the exhibition:
Eternity is fulfilled by humanity, rather than by each single individual, and the world depends on some people returning to its true nature. Every generation has its own particular style.
If you don’t strive for the highest point in life, you cannot improve.
……
And so on. Even though the exhibition only ran for one day, it attracted a large audience. In November, they had organized the Second New Figurative Exhibition at the Shanghai Art Museum.[31] At the end of the year, Ye Yongqing, when waiting the birth of his daughter Ye Funa in the hospital in Kunming, wrote a detailed introduction to the Southwestern artists in an article titled “An Outline Description of the Natural Consciousness in the Paintings of the Southwestern Group”. This article provided a detailed introduction to the prolific artists of the Southwest and summarized their work: it can be seen that they all have different approaches and different angles for understanding “nature”, but they transcend the simplistic tie between art and nature that characterized the previous generation of painters; they emphasize the self-consciousness [self-awareness] of understanding, as well as an original, mysterious, and unknowable consciousness. Ye Yongqing even introduced the artistic features of different artists. Ye Yongqing’s point of view was at the same time very different in its artistic point of departure from the “New Space” and “Chishe” (Pond Society) groups of Hangzhou exemplified by such contemporaries as Zhang Peili and Geng Jianyi; Ye Yongqing’s article was not published, perhaps because its spirit did not chime with the articles being accepted by the editor of Art Trends. From Huangjueping, Zhang Xiaogang wrote a letter of encouragement to Ye Yongqing, but he was also aware that Ye Yongqing’s views would not be welcome during the high tide of the “85’ art movement”, saying his ideas were “out of synch with the times” and commenting that “this article will be seen as ‘passive and backward’ by today’s ‘militants’!” [32] At this time, Zhang had been teaching at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts for over a year. He too had included some new works among the “Western Group’s” slides and pictures in the Fourth Exhibition of New Figurative Works staged in the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in December 1986, but thereafter, the “New Figuratives” ceased to function.
“The Other Shore”
Working as a teacher after graduating from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, Ye Yongqing in addition to being Zhang Xiaogang’s friend and classmate was also a new ally in Zhang’s artistic adventure; at the same time as Zhang was soliciting his help in trying to return to the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, Ye Yongqing hoped that Zhang would succeed in returning to the academy to teach so that he would have a fellow traveler who would increase the forces at the school supporting the new art. When the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts was setting up an art teacher training department, Ye Yongqing had the opportunity to discuss the secondment of Zhang Xiaogang to the academy with the head of the new Department, Yin Qiong. At the end of August 1985, Zhang was recalled to the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, and so finally returned to his alma mater to work; Zhang saw this as the second major transition in his life following his move from Jinning to take up study at the academy for the first time. In fact, the years from 1982 to 1984 had for Zhang Xiaogang been time spent drinking, reading, listening to Western music and looking around for ways of surviving and making art; whenever he and his friend Mao Xuhui reminisced about this crazy and simple time, as they often did. From Western philosophy they adopted the assertion that a person must determine his or her own destiny, and from psychoanalytical theory they understood the existence of the subconscious to be the determinant of human nature. However, being artists, these were simply lines from hastily printed publications or Western popular books that made an immediate and deep impression on them and influenced them when their understanding was subject to the stimulus of alcohol. However, by August 1985, after Zhang had been recruited to return to the academy to teach, he gradually began to find himself more in the mood and to have more time to continue reading more of the Western works that were being continuously published. At school, Ye Yongqing became the person to whom Zhang Xiaogang poured out his ideas about art and life; they share a common background in Yunnan province, and were interested in the minority nationality areas of the Southwest, even though Ye Yongqing was more fascinated by the symbols and imagery from Xishuangbanna. As a result, in the space of just a few years, Ye Yongqing and Zhang Xiaogang developed similarities in the approach, and even in the style, of their painting.[33] Yet in 1985 Zhang Xiaogang’s painting appeared to lack clear direction: sometimes he tried to paint in a way similar to how he had painted the people and scenery of Guishan and Nuohei two years previously; at other times he would attempt to paint fairly abstract images using techniques like those of Miró; sometimes in his compositions one can see traces of Dali; and at other times symbols of Picasso appear in his watercolor works. Most of these paintings were painted in spring when he had just returned from Shenzhen to Kunming, but it can be clearly seen, he was already instinctively avoiding the psychological fall into the abyss of his “ghosts” period. He painted a work titled Exhausted Ghosts (Pijuan de youling) which clearly expressed his inner weariness and lack of strength, and even though a desirable life seemed to lie before him, the ghost in the painting (the artist himself) was paralyzed by fear or hesitation. At this time, we can see the white sheets in the hospital, and the real and urgently compelling ghost, pursuing desire and also pursuing the exhausted patient. Yet in a work titled The World of Silence (Jijing de shijie) completed at about the same time, apples rain down from a tree and in the distance there is a lonely ghost that appears insignificant and pathetic. Zhang’s physical recovery led him to try and calm himself, generally speaking, but somehow in the wake of his return from Shenzhen as a “failure”, Zhang’s true state of mind was tormented by “silence” and “exhaustion”. In the winter, when he was seconded to teach at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, he painted a winter scene, in which we can feel how Zhang at this time was still prey to the psychologically unstable emotions that had taken shape over the last few years, and how he still thought fondly of Guishan and the myths surrounding it, clearly nostalgic for that pure and once imagined world. One change he noted was that now that he had returned to the art college he had so long dreamed of, the environment of the school was no longer what it had been back in 1982, when he was filled with passion for the environment of reading and creative work at the Academy; now he saw that this reality had been shattered and in a letter of January 1986 to Ye Yongqing he began to describe some of the extremely trivial things that made him unhappy, including the failure and disappointment of the meaningless house-painting business. At the end of this letter he unexpectedly remarked: “Ever since I came back I have been busy with classes. After I finished giving my course, Yin Qiong wants to give me more classes, which feels like hard labor and is something I just can’t stand!!!” Those three exclamation marks, however, betray that he may have forgotten that he had only been seconded to the position for a period of six months to give his course; his status was still indefinite and, in fact, in this informal teaching position he could not really complain about any extra work he acquired. Obviously, Zhang’s real purpose in returning was to get the school to allow him to simply paint and he seems to have had no interest in any other work. This young artist from Yunnan was still mentally troubled and had not made a full recovery; when he had time to think again about art he once again found himself feeling troubled. In March, he returned to Kunming via Xishuangbanna and learned that Zhou Chunya had received a financial guarantor’s letter from Germany that would enable him to go there to study; Zhang derived some encouragement from that, but he told Zhou: “Lately I profoundly feel that my own art is at a crossroads. I have no idea of how I can go on, so I just read more and paint randomly”.[34]
Zhang wanted to crawl out from the “abyss”, as he described in a letter of July 1992 describing that earlier time:
At the beginning of 1985, after I completed the Ghosts series, I felt myself sink into a bottomless abyss of “isolation”. An overwhelming sense of depression and absurdity coming from all directions left me feeling exhausted and left me with a sense of total despair regarding meaning and value of human life and about emotional relationships. I had been running about and wandering around for several years, trying to find the meaning of life, but now I felt doubt and loathing about my “self” that I had set such store by, and from which I now felt a strong desire to escape.[35]
Although it had been a long time since he had expected any help from his parents regarding his future, he still had expectations that society, his unit, and his painter and poet friends might recompense him [OR但是，他仍然对社会、单位以及那些画家和诗人朋友还报之有期待anticipated that he had to repay society, his unit, and his painter and poet friends]. However, he was also still discovering that in the end only the individual could determine his own fate and extricate the self from whatever anguish or abyss into which he had plunged. It was similar to his reading of D. T. Suzuki’s explanation of the coming to realization of the Buddha: “Seek liberation from the self, not from others”. When Zhang Xiaogang read D. T. Suzuki’s Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, he acquired a new perspective on the teachings of Nietzsche, Sartre, and Schopenhauer he had accepted over the years, and now realized that all of redemption depended on the self, and that one could never hope to obtain grace from elsewhere even if one was able to heed Heaven’s promised undertakings. [不要对来自任何地方的恩典报以希望，即便能够经常听到上天的承诺CHECK] Such a reading triggered ideas in Zhang Xiaogang’s mind that were quite out of the ordinary: reflections on the divine and disappointment with reality; an understanding life and death combined with trust in the power of religion; explanations of dilemmas combined with inescapable doubts. Unlike Western philosophy, Zen is the cultivation of natural spontaneity and the move towards a state of tranquility, but how does it dispel inner gloom to attain this state? Previously, Zhang’s heart had been filled with the passions that were derived from Nietzsche, and it was with a sense of mission that he and his friends discussed the themes of destiny, tragedy, and responsibility that Nietzsche invoked, just as Jesus was willing to accept the reality of suffering and sacrifice for all of mankind. At the same time, another philosophy was telling him: such extreme passions must be subdued. Zhang Xiaogang may previously have been in pursuit of certainty and a clear attitude, he and his friends subscribed to a logic based on the idea of “sacrifice” exorcising the suffering, in order to attain what was good and beautiful in the world. However, those who hoped to attain this salvation actually lived in this reality; this was a world of unending contradictions, and Zen thought told Zhang Xiaogang: beyond this relative world, there is another world, on the other shore; in the world on the other shore persistent clinging is eliminated and oppositions are erased, so that everyone has the opportunity to arouse the underlying Buddha-nature that is within us. Zhang Xiaogang does not seem to have had any specific sense of “Buddha” or “Buddha nature”; he seems to have been willing to invest his intuition and dreaming into his understanding of “the other shore”, and he never seems to have fully realized that he would inevitably never be able to accommodate the ideas of those Western thinkers, writers, and artists who had previously sustained him within this purely flawless “other shore”. When he thought about this problem, all his efforts represent striving “for that existence alone”, and in order to approach this existence, the important thing was not “style” but the necessary “form” with which to attain “intuitive experience and liberation”. Zhang Xiaogang clearly referred his philosophical problems to their expression in painting, and he wanted his painting to help him attain the other shore.
Indeed, in 1986, in the course of his reading, he wrote about the question of “being”. In May he completed an essay titled “For that Existence”, but there is another essay of the same title written in August “For that Existence: From the First Letter of the Night”, which was a revision of the previous essay. Zhang Xiaogang, in these two essays completed in quite different emotional states, mixed what he experienced and what he knew. In line with the influences from Buddhist literature that he accepted at this time, the artist should have been able to follow effortlessly the waves of Zen ideas to “the other shore”; many traditional Chinese painters had already followed that path of artistic development. But in the modified essay he completed in August, Zhang Xiaogang not only recalled the myths of the Yi people inhabiting the Da Liangshan mountains, but also the profound emotions evoked by the account of El Greco’s experiences; he also referred to the story of Millet, and the legend of Gauguin, and tragically confronted [Mark] Rothko’s fate [DON’T UNDERSTAND THE LAST – DID ROTHKO HAVE A TERRIBLE FATE?: 以及悲剧性地面对画面的罗斯科的命运]. From these great artists and their art he felt he had discovered a shared commonality: What power ultimately controlled them? In his first essay, he expressed his awareness that there was no difference between what he understood to be dreams and reality; there were no boundaries and in his dreams there was, however, a “vast existence”. However, there were no written works which could explain this other existence, and at this time only Suzuki spoke to him: in the world of the other shore there is no good and evil, no right and wrong, no sin, no ugliness, and no attachment. Yet, Zhang Xiaogang also hoped that he could place his own fantasies and imaginings in that world and even derive pleasure and pain from them. This was a phase of dream and delusion, and Zhang tended to search for something that he was trying to avoid yet could not abandon. Thus, when he revised “For that Existence”, he preferred to continue pondering his own existence. The “existence” that he continued to ponder was for him mystical; Zhang Xiaogang largely resorted to the language of poetry and the emotions of the prose-poem to find and describe the existence he imagined, and this was inseparable from the imagery in his dreams:
Another silent night,
Your presence is come once again stealthily among us.
Everything is quiet and still, even the stars are drowning in your own dreams, as every last drop of rain slides down the autumn leaves, and the mountains recede with the last glimpse of rosy light, as the evening breeze caresses the lush trees, singing the final harmony, you always quietly descend to a mind now open.
……
You place milk on the leaves of trees, you entrust yourself to the clouds, you hide in the shadows beyond our imagination. But your cruel love leads us in pursuit of so many illusions...
Reading ancient Oriental philosophy effectively drew Zhang Xiaogang away from the personal reality generated by his anxiety and he began to think about the larger issues of life; in particular, as an artist, he almost instinctively he began to ponder the intrinsic and common features of the great masters in art history. He wanted to put aside these artists’ petty superficialities, specific real problems, different styles, and even the depression and pain each personally suffered, in order to explore whether there were forces able to explain this world so that they attained sublimation and transcendence. This thinking brought about a change in Zhang Xiaogang’s own artistic practice.
Indeed, until the spring of 1986, Zhang felt free to experiment by sketching on paper his ideas for oil paintings reflecting different moods. No matter how dissatisfied he felt with his new environment, changes in work and further reading brought him a degree of calm and this inner state was reflected in the experimental oil paintings he painted that spring, such as Quiet Place (Qudi). This was a dreamscape, probably inspired by Freud, and at this time Zhang Xiaogang did not take into account any of his previous barriers. He used some residual forms and colors from Miró and Picasso to construct his own dreamscapes, and in the lower section of the composition he placed a head with bone beads; given his recent reading of books relating to Buddhism, the head was reminiscent of a Buddha’s head. Given this association, the plant growing in from of the naked woman on the mound should be understood as a lotus and the tree behind her as the Bodhi tree; she tries to summon the two goats above Buddha’s head. However, the force that directs the entire composition from above are the plantain leaves of Xishuangbanna , a place he had only just visited, and the large head that divides the composition. The free treatment of those nearly formalized blocks of color and images makes the entire picture calm and abstract, but those images that can be identified – the figures, the goats, and the trees – effectively confine this painting to the dream world in which the subconscious is liberated, rather than to the realm of abstract composition like the works of Kandinsky. This painting was clearly removed from the intense anxiety and fear of his Ghosts series, and it had become a visual poem, “sweet” and soothing in its effects, although the sexual impulse and erotic intensity of the work remained obvious. This painting completed in spring presented the meditations of this adventurous young man caught between life and death as he embarked on the road of physical recovery. In the morning of 27 January, he wrote an essay entitled “Memories of the Devil”. In fact, this essay was his reminiscence about his state of mind and spirit when he was previously in hospital. Compared his 1984 notes about hospitalization, the mood and attitude of the text are somewhat calmer, and he even seems to find pleasure in the structuring of his dreams. He describes a conversation with the devil that is calm and filled with wisdom:
The devil said: “My strength is limitless”. I said, “Because we’re in the dark of night”. At this hour, people are the most vulnerable, lonely, and sensitive of creatures. At this time, one can sit with and observe one’s other self, shake hands with the spirits, hear the celestial harmonies, and also be one with all that is touched by the Devil’s kiss. Man in the dark is completely open, down to each tiny cell.[36]
These dream soliloquies saw Zhang Xiaogang embark on a new journey. One day, he discovered a new way of working with cardboard, by cutting it into outlines of images and economically smearing and working oil paint in various different ways, a method somewhat similar to print making. For the whole summer, he constantly experimented with similar size pieces of cardboard, and when in autumn he returned to classes in Chongqing, he had completed the earliest part of his Lost Dreams (Yimeng ji) series.
In September 1986, Zhang Xiaogang wrote a piece for the Yunnan Art Newsletter (Yunnan meishu tongxun) titled “In Search of That Existence: Second Letter from the Night”. He seemed to be attempting to defend his art and that of his friends in this official institutional publication. Officialdom was beginning to look at modernism with concern, which reflected of course the political climate of the country. When Mao Xuhui returned to Kunming from Zhuhai and introduced the new art at an Artists Association meeting, he was inadvertently winning approval from the Yunnan Provincial Artists Association, and when they were accepted as members of the association, Mao Xuhui, Pan Dehai, and Zhang Xiaogang each won a subsidy of 50 yuan per person to stage an exhibition of the “New Figurative” art. The Yunnan Provincial Artists Association’s newsletter also began to include critical essays introducing new art works. Zhang Xiaogang was greatly influenced and sustained by the enthusiasm and hard work of Mao Xuhui, so much so that he also decided to participate in the practical work of promoting the advance of the new art, rather than just being a sensitive and skeptical artist working alone. At the time of writing this article (August), Zhang Xiaogang also took part in the founding meeting of the “Southwest Art Group” held in Mao Xuhui’s dormitory room at the Kunming Municipal Film Company. From then on, increasing numbers of young artists in China’s southwest joined this avant-garde group [37]. In the article, Zhang Xiaogang used his dream soliloquies to explain their new art and he described how their art, through its treatment of life’s miseries and hardships, joys, and sorrows as well as its interweaving of the soul and the body, “released desire in the most direct way”; their art was simply the crystallization releasing life’s dramatic conflicts. Although he interpreted the abandoned or buried loneliness and brash feelings of these young artists as expressions of excessive self-confidence, he argued that they were probably influenced by their reading and they vigilantly monitored their concern for the truth: they defended the eternity of the natural world of phenomena. He returned again and again to the paintings by Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin that he had first seen, and to the core questions raised by the Western works he first read: “Thousands of years have passed. Mankind has undergone great changes, and we have discovered and created so many different things! But each person still only has four seasons in a year. In spring the flowers bloom, in winter the frost covers everything, and for thousands of years, the sea has always hit the rocks on the shore with the same waves. …… We return to the sea again and again, to watch the waves dance and meditate: ‘Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?’” [38]
Indeed, in 1986 Zhang Xiaogang emerged from his depression and traumatic spiritual crisis and entered a stage of relative calm and loving. In the summer of 1985, he was waiting for a letter notifying him of his secondment to the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in Chongqing, but he also visited He Duoling and Zhou Chunya at the Chengdu Painting Academy. As Zhang Xiaogang saw it, the working conditions of these two former fellow students at the Academy seemed unparalleled, because He Duoling and Zhou Chunya each had their own studios, and as painters at the Academy their daily work was simply painting. Their studios were next to the Academy’s small canteen, and with music playing in the background this became a gathering place for their friends. If they wanted, friends of the two artists could also paint in their studios and order set meals from the canteen. It was here that Zhang Xiaogang met his wife-to-be Tang Lei. As a friend of the artists, Tang Lei would often drop in to the academy and her brother, Tang Wen was a friend of He Duoling. They painted together, and as early as 1980 together completed a painting titled We Sang This Song (Women zeng changguo zhe zhi ge), which was credited to Tang Wen. Zhang Xiaogang, He Duoling and Zhou Chunya all collaborated on painting a portrait of Tang Lei, but only later did they have more contact with her. At the end of the last semester of 1986, Tang Lei began to have very close contact with Zhang Xiaogang; around mid-October, Zhang finally completed the formalities for transferring as a teacher to the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, and from then on he became a teacher. Throughout 1987, Zhang Xiaogang was in love, and by 1988, Zhang married Tang Lei and set up a home in Chengdu; Zhang Xiaogang’s life of often moving lodgings had come to an end. His reading, being in love, and having a stable job all meant of course that Zhang Xiaogang was in a completely new frame of mind, and the mood and tone of his works in the two years were imbued with love and happiness. While he and his friends continued to discuss “loneliness”, “pain”, “nothingness”, “death” ,and “tragedy”, he also began to integrate his once fragile and readily defeated spirit with his higher level of awareness acquired through reading; in a letter dated April 14, 1987 that he wrote to Mao Xuhui he discussed the themes that had long fascinated them, such as the passage of time, some higher understanding, the awareness of suffering and tragedy, and the discussion of death and intuition, finally concluding: “I am almost thirty, but I still believe this simple principle: only with ‘love’ is there meaning. One loves the ‘tragedy’, otherwise the concept of ‘life’ becomes an absurd word for us; one must love the absurdity of existence, otherwise ‘death’ becomes the only thing”.[39] At that time, he linked “love”, “dreaming”, and “existence”, and he forgot his earlier Zen ideas; how could the questions of “absurdity” and “tragedy” which he so stressed help his attempt to enter the world of “the other shore”! His inner wish in seeking the existence on the other shore was to find his own form of artistic expression; this was the constant inner need of Zhang Xiaogang from 1986 until early 1989. Zhang Xiaogang’s reading opened his transcendental consciousness, allowing him to avoid suffering extreme individualism, and making him aware of a more extensive and supreme force governing all existence, but finding the form that could express this existence would take time and require the artist to search for and clarify the language of his persistent dreams.
The series he began in the summer of 1986 titled Lost Dreams comprised imagistic poems about dreaming that expressed Zhang Xiaogang’s transitional ideas; within the formulation attributed to Freud that “dreams are wish fulfillment”, these works were simply the artist’s creation of the varying content of his irrepressible dream landscapes, with each painting relating a story about desire. In summer, Ye Yongqing with whom in Chongqing Zhang Xiaogang had continuously discussed art and life returned to Kunming to take care of his pregnant partner Fu Liya and, unless the school required him to return temporarily to Chongqing for classes, Ye Yongqing would remain in Kunming until November when his daughter was due. Although at this time Zhang Xiaogang remained economically strapped,[40] he already had plans to go on painting quietly on his own at the Taohuashan Hostel. Being in love and becoming increasingly able to work in a more stable frame of mind,[41] Zhang Xiaogang constantly read and remembered the past, each of his paintings recounting the untold stories that filled his brain. Now, Zhang Xiaogang once again intentionally ignored the material world and started to construct dreams that transcended the real world. It was now no longer El Greco or Kokoschka but the dream landscapes and the mysterious heads of the French painter Odilon Redon that influenced him, and he transposed all his earlier repertoire of images into his new works. This repertoire obviously included the Yunnan ethnic minority masks, the totems, icons, images from traditional art, and his memories and experiences of the Tibetan areas and of Nuohei, as well as modernist images; all these provided resources and methodologies for his dream. He managed to bring together this mixture of elements with no historical relationship, and create works replete with a mystical and serene atmosphere. Regarding one painting that encompassed a composition depicting two women and titled Creatures of Desire (Qiwang zhong de shengling), Zhang wrote the following in “For That Existence”, clearly influenced by Buddhism:
Please stretch out your hands, so I can give you sacrifices, but please don’t take them away, because that’s not everything we have. Please stretch out your hands, I hear you in the first dewdrops in the floating clouds.
In this passage, the hands, the clouds, and the dew are all symbols of Buddhist thought, but the naked girls with apples in their hands are symbols taken from Christian civilization. The artist apparently disregarded the logic of these different cultural backgrounds because he was constructing his own dream world. He was attempting to express the idea that the dew draws close to that “magnificent existence” in a way similar to his description in the revised version of “For That Existence”: “Always and everywhere without exception, in every drop of dew, in every self that slowly fades away, in every call in the night, we anticipate the magnificent existence”. But this passage also readily suggests the light of God bathing everything.
Regarding the painting titled Lost Dreams, VI, Zhang Xiaogang wrote:
You’re pouring milk among the leaves of the tree, inside the clouds, you place your love on that end of the slope, the wind calls, you hide your shadows beyond our imagination, and one day I will tell you that the goat revealed everything.
Those words were written in August in the revised version of “For That Existence” and the artist was freely writing his own views into the work.
About another painting, titled Lost Dreams, VIII, the artist wrote:
You descend together with the night, you accompany the sun as it fades, leaving only a leaf of a tree; only that goat when the sun sets describes your whereabouts with his eyes.
The girls in the paintings seem possess appearances and states that belong both to reality and to dreams, subject to constant flux, but what can the spindly goat standing at the top of the work, as if standing on a huge rock, know? This state is simply an illusion created by the artist, who is attempting to let the images in the picture concretely manifest a real dream. This is a metaphor of love, the invisible “you” left behind as a red leaf, a crucible of love, a burning desire – this was Zhang Xiaogang’s own desire at that time.
In many of the works in the Lost Dreams series, the bodices and headscarves of the female protagonists - often his wife Tang Lei – are very deliberately painted by the artist; the white fabric is painted with thick and opaque oils, while other parts of the work are painted using thin and almost transparent watercolor paint. In fact, the white fabric readily reminds us of the white sheets in the earlier Ghosts series; here, the white fabric has switched roles and symbolism, although love and death remain intrinsically linked.
In his earliest works, Zhang Xiaogang often included goats, and these were frequently seen images in his earlier painting set on the Tibetan grasslands, in Guishan in Yunnan, and in other minority villages. The goat is in China a symbol of life, sometimes the expression of purity, sometimes the spirit of quirkiness, and sometimes they have the role of bystanders, silently articulating what the artist wants to say. It is possible that this was a persistent image from his childhood memory of watching the vintage movie Notre Dame de Paris in school and being fascinated by the Gipsy woman who carries a single goat. In his series Lost Dreams, the goats become symbols of the hidden inner world of the artist. They do not represent sacrifice nor do they stand for all living things; instead they represent Zhang Xiaogang’s spirit of curiosity, spying on existence, love, or some girl’s secret. In many cases, it is only a shy expression of his love, like a young man saying to the girl he loves, “Where are you going?”, when in fact he knows.
In late 1986, Zhang felt duty-bound to work at the Fourth New Figurative Exhibition being staged by the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. This was in the later stages of the so-called “85’ art movement”; earlier, in April the “Oil Painting Art Committee” had sponsored the “National Oil Painting Art Seminar” (14-17 April) and invited a number of avant-garde artists and critics to take part, including Zhang Peili, Shu Qun, Li Shan, Zhu Qingsheng, and Gao Minglu. Even though such veteran prominent artists, such as Zhan Jianjun, Wen Lipeng, Wu Zuoren, Luo Gongliu, and Wu Guanzhong, also participated in this conference, Gao Minglu was permitted to present his academic report on the “85’ art movement” and several hundred slides of new wave artists including the New Figuratives. This event obviously fired the enthusiasm of the young people who wanted society and the art world to understand the new art, and it also later encouraged the New Figurative artists to organize exhibitions and other activities. In September that year, the “Southern Barbarian” art group was founded in Kunming, and members included Su Xinhong and Ma Xiangsheng, who were good friends with the members of the New Figurative artists. Earlier in June, when they hear that a modernist group in Chengdu called “Red, Yellow and Blue” was organizing an exhibition, Zhang Xiaogang made enquiries and suggested to Zhou Chunya that they hold a three-man (Zhou Chunya, Zhang Xiaogang, Ye Yongqing) exhibition in Chengdu. At that time new wave art was spreading through the cities of China, enthusing Zhang Xiaogang about organizing the Fourth “New Figurative” Exhibition at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. In a letter to Ye Yongqing dated 1 December 1986, Zhang cheerfully described his exhibition program:
The program I am planning will be a three-day art event at the end of this month, similar to an art festival. The main activities will be: (1) A display of photographs of our works and texts, which Yin Qiong already supports. This will be a daytime event. (2) We will ask activists (in philosophy, literature, and photography) from other schools to come and organize seminars. This is more or less organized. (3) We will let the students put on a modernist drama, written, directed, and played by the students. This might be more difficult. (4) A slide night. If you are okay with the idea, we could show the photographs we took in Xishuangbanna, and give a leisurely explanation of the customs, religion, and so on.
In the letter Zhang Xiaogang also talked about inviting lots of people from other schools, to shake up the dead atmosphere at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. Zhang Xiaogang took the lead in organizing some of his students at the school to set up three exhibition venues, and although he was often complaining about being penniless, he only required limited supplementary funds. In addition to the documentation and the exhibition of works by the young teachers, he also arranged a number of poetry and essay recitation activities. The objective of the exhibition was very simply stated:
When we realize that art is the material form assumed by the process of perpetuating life, and related art forms begin to assume a broader meaning.
“New Figurative” has nothing to do with any school of art; it is empty, but it also has a wide range of existence;
“New Figurative” has truth, action, and hierarchy as its content;
“New Figurative” has participation as its form.
These slogan-like ideological statements show that at this time Zhang Xiaogang was reading Western books in a rush, while his real purpose was asserting his own existence and changing existing art forms.
Unfortunately, an imminent nationwide political campaign against “bourgeois liberalization” had been announced by the Communist Party and all independent activities and debate at schools and academic institutions was proscribed. Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts was quick to implement the orders issued by the Communist Party and Zhang Xiaogang was told that he would be unable to include any of planned recitation events in the event he was organizing. Once the school issued its warnings and the potential participants all scattered, Zhang was once again left feeling isolated and helpless, although two young girls from the middle school attached to the Academy, He Weina and Chen Xi kept him company and helped him kill time by the river near the school. By nature, Zhang had never had any faith in organizational work and he remained skeptical about the possibilities, and it was only because of the enthusiasm of Mao Xuhui and his friends that the First “New Figurative” Exhibition had become a reality. Now it was the “artistic” ambition of Mao Xuhui and his friends that gave Zhang Xiaogang the confidence and the idealistic enthusiasm to throw himself into the work of organizing the exhibition. In order to live up to everyone’s hopes, as well as to advance the cause of art, Zhang Xiaogang assumed the responsibility for spreading and promoting modernist art at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. However, the institutional and political constraints plunged this cautious young man into a crisis. On December 28, Zhang sent a report on the progress he was making with his exhibition to Mao Xuhui and Ye Yongqing in Kunming. At the start of the letter he gave a resolute and spirited account of his planning and design of the art events, and wrote that “the moribund posturing of the Academy of Fine Arts failed to dent” the exhibition and art activities that had been enthusiastically arranged. Zhang Xiaogang described the event: “The upshot was that many people attended the event, both Chinese and foreigners, and some people waited for the exhibition to open from the early hours of the morning. The leaders of the Academy and a number of shady people also filed through the exhibition, which was unprecedented”.
In the end, however, the Fourth “New Figurative” Exhibition did not go according to plan, as Zhang Xiaogang described in a subsequent letter of 28 December:
Starting from the first day the leaders summoned me for a talk and on the morning of the next day, the people from the Party office again summoned me for a talk! The reason was simple; the campus unrest in Shanghai had been spread by students from Shanghai who had come to Chongqing, where students now wanted to hold a street demonstration. This was bad timing and I had never expected that the school would now be watching me almost as though I was public enemy number one. In addition our partners, the members of the Chongqing Teachers College Literary Society suddenly left without warning yesterday morning, pulling the rug from under us, and the people who were going to present lectures (also from Chongqing Teachers College) scheduled for eight o’clock in the evening did not turn up. I had prepared everything and there were already a lot of people sitting in the auditorium; at the same time, behind the stage curtain, the Communist Party Secretary of the Academy was presiding over a meeting he had convened of the Communist Youth League’s Student Union to discuss the question of the student movement. At the same time other people were all suddenly disappearing! I felt so isolated![42]
He was so dejected that his “demon rodent” (Zhang Xiaogang’s own term) was once again telling him that he missed Guishan, the pure souls and adorable goats who inhabited the place, but he wanted to return to Kunming to be with his friends and resume the simple life he once led there. In fact, at this time, the student demonstrations and slogans in Shanghai and other places had gone well beyond the limits imposed by the Communist Party, and a government political campaign calling for “opposition to bourgeois liberalization” had already been launched both within the Party and throughout the country. In mid December, a number of college students took to the streets to demonstrate in cities like Shanghai, Nanjing, Hefei, Wuhan, and Hangzhou, as well as in Beijing, and in some schools posters proclaiming political ideas other than those of the Communist Party had appeared, touching on such sensitive and taboo topics as calling for an acceleration of the processes of implementing socialist democracy and political reform. On 16 January in the following year, the CPC held an enlarged meeting of the Politburo and Communist Party Secretary Hu Yaobang came under fire politically. Hu was effectively forced to resign as General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee. On 17 January, the CPC Anhui Provincial Committee took the decision to expel Fang Lizhi from the position of vice-chancellor of the Chinese University of Science and Technology, accusing him of inciting the student demonstrations, denying socialism, and preaching bourgeois “democracy” and “freedom”.[43] In any event, the failure of the activities Zhang Xiaogang tried to organize made him again realize that his own work should be personal and private. On 31 May 1987, he wrote to Mao Xuhui:
Recently I have found myself running up against reality again and again and encountering one dilemma after another. I genuinely hoped that we could return, at least “superficially”, to being students once more.
Obviously that’s impossible; we already have too much experience. I hope these experiences will be something we treasure, rather than something that drags us down. Writing this reminds me of how I once worshipped Kuafu, the Sun God. Now I find that I still want to possess the spirit of Kuafu – and become a new type of Kuafu with a consciousness of tragedy and burning passions.[44]
After this setback he derived renewed strength from his love of art and, of course, from his love of art history, inspired by such mythic characters as Vincent Van Gogh.[45] Indeed, from the early 1980s, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and others exerted an influence on young artists in China that endured throughout the vicissitudes and experiences of those early years. Far from being discouraged by adversity, Zhang Xiaogang thought of himself as a member of an artistic avant-garde, inheriting the spirit of China’s ancient gods; he believed that he now had a renewed perception of art.
In 1987, Zhang Xiaogang moved out of the school’s Taohuashan Dormitory and into the second building of the new Huayuan dormitory. The failure of the events he organized for the Fourth New Figurative Exhibition to materialize left him in despair about the political environment, so he cut himself off and continued to paint his “Lost Dreams” series. In the works he completed in 1987, Zhang Xiaogang often included figures reminiscent of those to be found in traditional Chinese landscape paintings, especially in woodland settings; his compositions were also more open and he accorded a more expansive sense of space to depicting his dreams. His works included folk art elements taken from China’s minority ethnic groups, Buddhist (especially Indian Buddhist) symbols, as well as stylistic and atmospheric influences from the works of traditional Chinese painters (such as the ancient Gu Kaizhi and the early modern Ren Bonian), all juxtaposed and blended with memories, references to Western books that he had read, and life as he experienced it. Yet in this period he sought to express different elements of “the other shore”; in “looking for that existence”, he was also conducting his search through different images and symbols. The reality of love and a relatively stable life triggered more mellow imaginings in the artist’s mind, even if untoward images and symbols remained. An example of the latter is the fifteenth painting in the Lost Dreams series, The Hearty Supper (Fengsheng de wancan), in which a goat leaps like a vicious wolf to devour some tasty morsel; this is merely a dramatic vignette from the other shore and is neither evil nor ominous in its import. In many of the compositions of this period, the images of girls are based on sketches of his wife Tang Lei; it is easy to relate these paintings to the artist’s life and his state of mind, and Zhang Xiaogang simply required this female protagonist to act as a stand-in in the roles his dream landscapes required.
The Lost Dreams series totaled more than forty pieces completed from the summer of 1986 to the end of 1988, during which time he was married to Tang Lei and lived mostly in Chengdu. Although he completed several similar works in the first half of 1989, in terms of theme and mood the other works he completed in that year were markedly different from earlier paintings, because of the political events that took place in Beijing in that year. His Lost Dreams series ended because of the shattering impact of events in the outside world.
Zhang Xiaogang and Tang Lei lived in Chengdu was in the dormitory of the Zouma Road Post Office. After their marriage Zhang Xiaogang tried to live and do all his work in Chengdu, time and funds permitting. Old classmates from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts such as He Duoling, Zhou Chunya, and Mou Huan were in Chengdu, while Tang Lei’s family home was also behind that of Lü Peng and in front of that of Yi Dan, a professor and cultural historian from Sichuan University. This group of people would always be stopping by, while out-of-town friends would join the group at someone’s house, to chat, discuss philosophy, and listen to music. In those days there were almost no cafés or bars, so there were countless nights when artists and friends from literary circles and from out of town would gather in the cramped music room of their very small home, drinking, and discussing issues related to philosophy, music, and the arts.
There was one day in 1988, when the Chengdu artists Zhang Xiaogang, Tang Wen, and Mou Huan gathered in Zhang Xiaogang’s Zouma Road home discussing art issues heard that critics in Beijing regarded the art of China’s southwest as “local” rustic art, not modern art; the young radicals in Chengdu were furious and decided to stage an exhibition of modern art from Sichuan province to show how biased the critics of Beijing were. Zhang suggested that since Beijing’s critics were opposed to the Southwest, the best thing to do was to stage an exhibition of art from the southwest that entirely comprised modernist art. In October, under the auspices of the Sichuan Dramatists Association, the “88 Southwest Modern Art Exhibition was staged in the Sichuan Provincial Art Museum. This exhibition brought together artists from Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou: Zhang Xiaogang, Mao Xuhui, Ye Yongqing, He Duoling, Pan Dehai, Mou Huan, Shen Xiaotong, Gu Xiong, Yang Shu, Ma Yun, Chen Heng, and Li Hui’ang. In addition the show included invitees from the “Red, Yellow and Blue” Painting Society who had staged an exhibition in Chengdu two years previously: Li Jixiang, Dai Guangyu, and Wang Falin. In the early summer of 1988, Lü Peng passed through Hunan on his return from Hainan and met a number of editors from the Hunan Fine Arts Press with whom he already established a correspondence - Zou Jianping, Li Luming, and Sun Ping. As a result, Zou and Li also participated in this exhibition, and devoted a whole special issue of the magazine they produced, Painters (Huajia), to the exhibition in Sichuan. During the process of preparing for the exhibition, Mao Xuhui also invited the Henan painter Ding Defu to participate.
1988 was the third year in which Zhang Xiaogang worked on the Lost Dreams series, and he realized that it might be time for him to think about changing his language. For the “88 Southwest Modern Art Exhibition” he had created a triptych titled Eternal Love (Shengsheng buxi), which related to the themes of men and women, life and death, reality and fantasy. The artist very obviously placed images of his wife and himself in the composition, and he also wanted to show that this was his personal fantasy; the images beside his own figure in the work – namely the goats, the baby, and the bird, all derive from his own experiences and memories. We can see this triptych as Zhang Xiaogang’s return to the allegorical and fabulist world of the Lost Dreams series, and as another chapter in the artist’s imaginative quest for “the other shore”. In that year, Zhang Xiaogang painted very few other works in the Lost Dreams series, though in these two years he had completed more than 30 works. At the same time, news of developments in modern art in Beijing, Hangzhou, and other cities continuously provoked Zhang to think deeply about his own artistic language. He was aware that “the existence” he sought was intangible, and that if he wanted to recreate it, he had to give it an appropriate form. At this time, he regarded “form” as a narrated fable filtered through the imagination; it was also lyric poetry expressing an idyll utterly different from the themes of his previous “Ghosts” series, and even if it addressed the theme of life and death, the context was a relaxed and unforced theoretical meditation. Perhaps after losing God, the artist needed to consider issues of life and death; however, even while Zhang Xiaogang at this time was meditating upon “death”, his contemplation of this theme was poetic and filled with literary metaphor; the result was a distinctive style, one embodying traces of an artistic language undergoing transformation.
Although Mao Xuhui and Zhang Xiaogang continued to discuss questions recalling various philosophies of life, from 1987 onwards new phenomena were emerging in New Wave art circles. After their “88 Southwest Modern Art Exhibition”, Zhang Xiaogang and his friends rushed to Huangshan, to participate in the rowdy “Huangshan Conference” where preparations were underway for the “Modern Art Exhibition”, scheduled to be staged in the China Art Gallery in February1989.
The Existence of Reality
On 28 January 1987, the CPC Central Committee issued its “Circular on Currently Combating Bourgeois Liberalization” which explained the strategy behind this new political campaign: it was strictly limited to the Party and would mainly be waged within the realm of political thought. This strategy was based on the decision at the Thirteenth Communist Party Plenum, held from 25 October to 1 November in Beijing, to “take economic construction as the central task”, to speed up and deepen the spirit of reform, and to continue implementing reforms in the economic field. However, by 1988, people generally felt that the atmosphere in the country was charged with tension; in a critical article titled “The Chinese People’s Most Pressing Problem is Global” in The World Economic Herald, its author hoped to rally a sense of revitalizing a nation in crisis:
From the perspective of overall economic strength and especially in terms of per capita indicators, it can be said that the nation has once again “entered the most dangerous of times”; the dangers now are no less than that life and death moment that gave rise to [our national anthem] March of the Volunteers.
If we fail to be aware of this situation …our state and nation may fall further behind, and we will have no position in the world.[46]
From 25 March to 13 April 1988 the first meeting of the Seventh National People’s Congress took place in Beijing, and it adopted a constitutional amendment that for the first time ensured the legal protection of the private economy.
On 26 April Hainan Province became China’s largest special economic zone and every large company and talent recruitment agency was overwhelmed by crowds, in scenes that were reminiscent of a similar mass recruitment that was initiated at the end of the Cultural Revolution more than 10 years previously. In July, the CPC Central Committee issued a notice calling for the gradual disbanding of Party groups and discipline inspection groups throughout the government. The circular stated that rescinding Party groups within the government was an important measure in the reform of the political system, prompting sensitive intellectuals to think this was an indication of an increased likelihood that there would be changes in the political field; the political reality was suddenly delivering specific innovative challenges, in contrast to the campaign to “oppose bourgeois liberalization” initiated by the Communist Party one year previously. On 11 June 1988, CCTV began airing the six-part television documentary series called Yellow River Elegy. In contrast with the long-standing practice of eulogizing images of Chinese culture such as the “Yellow River” and the “dragon”, the young scholars who wrote the series, led by Su Xiaokang, regarded such images as forces or reincarnations of evil. Yellow River Elegy also pointed out, in the fourth episode titled “The New Era”, that the shots fired by the battleship Aurora in 1917, signaling the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, also signaled that socialist countries would never be able to solve problems of economic development:
Sooner or later the countries of Eastern Europe, enclosed in the “Stalinist model” would “deviate from the true path” and implement reforms. On the Balkan Peninsula Yugoslavia rose up and broke free of the Soviet model, finding its own path. Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia also subsequently underwent change and took the road of reform. Once again history seemed to be raising the same doubts that Plekhanov had once raised.[47]
At this time, scholars felt that the ideas contained in a speech by the Chinese Communist Party’s General Secretary, Zhao Ziyang, “made sense”, because Zhao acknowledged in that speech the legitimacy or rationality of the “market economy” in the socialist economy.
In August, the CPC Central Committee decided to promote an overall reform of prices. This resulted in overheating in the economy and disarray in circulation, sparking a nationwide panic and bringing chaos to the economic order, which was a setback to price reform. On December 7, Jin Guantao, as an adviser of the “Peking University Institute of the Future”, organized a seminar on “The Future of China and the World”. At the seminar, Jin Guantao noted in his speech: “The socialist experiment and its failure are the two major legacies of 20th century”.[48] At this time that books and collections of essays treating the varying degrees of crisis in such fields as Chinese industry, energy, ecology, society, and ethics also made their appearance in bookshops and on street stalls. Hard-hitting and sharp reportage, social investigation, and various proposals for reform were being published. In its 3rd issue of 1989, the magazine Hainan Documentary edited and published “Summary of the Reform (Perestroika) in the Soviet Union” that had been issued in that country in 1988; almost every reform measure recorded in that summary as having been adopted in the USSR shocked Chinese readers. The Chinese people felt that their own country was undergoing a crisis across the board: the contradiction between rapid economic growth and the slow pace of political reform was becoming increasingly glaring, and the development of market economy mechanisms over the previous few years had further disrupted the social order established by the old regime. Accompanying the reform, various disturbing phenomena had begun to emerge across China: millions of people from rural villages were abandoning agricultural production and attempting to migrate to the big cities; many factories had collapsed and there was no work; rumors that there was an army of tens of millions of unemployed were creating panic; and, the surge in the number of unemployed people in 1988 was creating a tense crisis for governments throughout the country. Moreover, an army of “jobless migrants from rural areas” was on the move and infrastructure such as the railways could not cope with the numbers, resulting in many ugly incidents; inflation and “profiteering” was widespread,[49] as was official corruption. In response to all these phenomena, people felt that they were being subjected to an unbearable burden of mental and psychological pressure.
In April 1989, in the course of a debate with the philosopher Li Zehou, Liu Xiaobo, who had won a reputation as a young activist intellectual, announced that the Marxism, the ideological doctrine of the Chinese Communist Party, had failed in China:
In China and the Soviet Union, in particular, the significance of criticizing Marxism is no small matter and it is not something that is generally needed, but something that is urgently needed. Because in the East, the critique of Marxism is not just a discussion about a school of thought, but a critique of the tool of authoritarian dictatorship, and the critique is a necessary part of direct opposition to authoritarianism. Thus, my criticism is directed not so much at Marxism itself, but rather at the dictatorship of its Oriental mode.[50]
In any case, from 1988 to the first half of 1989 various social, ideological, and historical texts were published that impatiently revealed extreme dissatisfaction with the existing political system. Many intellectuals hoped for an acceleration in the pace of political reform, given the rapidity of economic reforms, and at this time the core focus of political reform undoubtedly involved the issue of whether China had one-party rule or multi-party governance.
In the art world, even though the Oil Painting Figural Art Exhibition was a blockbuster event of 1988, what more attracted the attention and consideration of modern artists and critics was the article titled “Our Times Await the Fervor of the Grand Soul” by the critic Li Xianting, writing under the pseudonym “Hu Cun”, which was published in China Art News (1988: 37). Regardless of the views of other critics and artists, the following views of Li Xianting long resonated with Mao Xuhui and Zhang Xiaogang:
The soul of our times has taken shape as a result of the dramatic cultural clash between East and West and the enormous contrasts between those who are advanced and those who are retrograde. In the deep resources of this grand soul, endless doubts swirl about violently: hope and despair interweave, ideals and reality are in contradiction, and the tradition and the future are in conflict, while pain, anxiety, hesitation, and all manner of suffering accompany reflections on culture as ideas are tossed back and forth.
Throughout this year, art critics initiated discussions addressing artistic ideas, themes, and language. In Li Xianting’s view, those concerned with the issue of artistic language tended to separate an artist’s spirit from an artist’s language, so that language could become something inane and as a result have another consequence; “at present the greatest risk contained within this ‘purification of language’ is that it can represent a fresh retreat from the spirit of the present age and a return to decorative notions (in its overall effect)”. Li Xianting emphasized the importance of the soul behind the works of the great masters throughout the ages as he described in the following statement:
There is no greater tragedy for the artist than to so insist on being an artist that he places himself within a history identified by the works of the great masters while failing to feel keenly the real era in which he actually exists. The moment when language, technique, and style become the artist’s goals, the artist becomes a worker who must go to the factory, and so his art might be created in the name of being “self-disciplined” but it has lost the conditions which sustain it and which come from the impact of life.
Li Xianting’s central idea in this article was simple and clear: art must continue to perform its mission of criticism. When the ponderous “grand soul” is once again raised, people will all feel challenged. The question of the “ontology of art” (or what art actually is) will also again be raised. However, in mid October 1988, at an international conference in Nanjing on “Trends in Contemporary Chinese Art” jointly convened in Nanjing by Jiangsu Fine Arts Publishing House and China Art News, the critic Jia Fangzhou proposed that if one wanted to be a fighter, one should absolutely forgo creating art. The reason for this view was quite simple: because during the Cultural Revolution period it was an historical fact that art served as a political tool, people remained fearful when art was linked with any theoretical strategy.
In practice, however, for these Southwestern artists Zhang Xiaogang and Mao Xuhui, the real challenge at this time was none of the fashionable questions, such as the “classicist style”, “new academicism”, so-called “purified” language, or the “ontology of art”.
In 1987, Geng Jianyi, who with Zhang Peili was an artist who painted according to his own created discipline, wrote an article titled “The Recent Painting of the Pond Society”; he seemed to have no interest in the vocabulary of “pain”, “the soul”, or “tragedy” and only wanted to evince audience reactions different from those of everyday experience, as well as which he stressed objectivity and strictness in methods of replication and reproduction with the aim of eliminating possible explanations of the meaning of art works. This already reveals a postmodern tendency to eliminate such explanatory constructs as emotions, feelings, and even thought. In 1988, Zhang Peili presented at the Huangshan Conference a video work titled “30x30” which was simply three hours without any change in content, thoroughly dispelling any of the expressionist sentiments that might have still prevailed. Another artist Huang Yongping who had graduated from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, presented a work titled Six Moving Turntables (Liuge zouxiang de xiao zhuanpan) completed in 1988 which was the same as a work he had completed a year earlier called Big Turntable (Da zhuanpan), thus discarding the control exerted by artistic experience over an artist in the process of taking shape a work and thereby permitting the spontaneous or the accidental to become a new beginning in art. These artistic paths had long since moved beyond the differences between “rational painting” and “the life stream”, two terms invented by the critic Gao Minglu, and in the hubbub of the forces of modernism new artistic concepts were constantly being generated. In 1988, Wang Guangyi’s thinking might possibly have not yet completely emerged from Nietzsche’s essentialism, but in 1986 he had begun in his experimental Post-classical (Hou gudian) series to emerge quite clearly from the symbolic expression of the “Northern Art Group” to which he had belonged; to the selection of classical paintings that provided the basis for his Post-classical series he applied grids, short lines, and mathematical symbols in an attempt to express his critical take on questions of art history and even cultural history. Soon, in February of the following year, he would propose a slogan that would widely catch on: “From this year on, my main task is to clean up the predicament in the art world illogically caused by humanistic enthusiasm”.[51] The artists of the Southwest China group were doubtful about, and dissatisfied with, this slogan because it seemed to imply that the expression and catharsis of the emotions and the subconscious no longer had cultural and historical significance.
From 22 to 24 November 1988, Ye Yongqing, Mao Xuhui, Pan Dehai, and Zhang Xiaogang attended the “Seminar on Modern Chinese Art” held on Huangshan Mountain in Anhui and organized by Gao Minglu and others. More than a hundred young artists and critics participated in the meeting. In the eyes of the organizers of the Conference, the time had come to stage an exhibition of modern art from the various cities nationwide, and those adventurous pioneers provided the theory and organization for the “China Modern Art Exhibition” to be held in February 1989 in the China Art Gallery (now called the National Art Museum of China) in Beijing.
Some aspects of the Huangshan Conference made Mao Xuhui and Zhang Xiaogang uneasy and suspicious.[52] Among the various conference events which included slide shows and the presentation of papers, Hou Hanru introduced Joseph Beuys and Huang Yongping showed slides of his highly conceptual works, which made a forceful impact on the artists from the Southwest, Ye Yongqing and Mao Xuhui. They possibly did not notice that the works and materials of avant-garde artists which had been brought to the conference by artists from different cities and which influenced the main organizers Li Xianting and Gao Minglu in determining which works qualified for inclusion in the Modern Art Exhibition; even though the art concepts of Li Xianting and Gao Minglu differed, in the process of constantly tracking down new art, they already felt that new art was undergoing a change. In any case, this New Wave art conference attracted all artists who hoped to participate in the art movement that was underway. At the invitation of the Director of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, Ma Yiping, Ye Yongqing, and Zhang Xiaogang were later invited to the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts to give a lecture about the Huangshan Conference; the information they presented and the influence of the new art exerted were a heady stimulant among the other teachers and students of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts.
Finally, in February 1989, the “China Modern Art Exhibition” for which preparations began at the Zhuhai Conference in 1986 finally opened at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. Ye Yongqing, Pan Dehai, Zhang Xiaogang, Mao Xuhui, Gu Xiong, and Yang Shu all participated in the exhibition. It was still winter, and because they did not have enough money, Tang Lei and Zhang Xiaogang, Ye Yongqing, Mao Xuhui, and the other Southwest artists lived in dormitories at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Each of them had paid the 50 yuan fee to participate in the Exhibition and, as a result, had no money left. The division of labor among the members of the Committee of the “China Modern Art Exhibition” was somewhat complex; for artists from outside Beijing, Gao Minglu and Li Xianting were the two who had the authority to make decisions. The Southwest artists did not necessarily understand the role and responsibility of the other committee members, namely, Fei Dawei, Hou Hanru, Kong Chang’an, Tang Qingnian, Wang Mingxian, Fan Di’an, Liu Xiaochun, and ZhouYan. Compared with Gao Minglu, Li Xianting still had passion or enthusiasm for the “grand soul”, and he had deep feelings for “life stream” art, and especially for the Southwest artists. On the Exhibition Committee Li Xianting was in charge of the work of designing the exhibition and planning the space; he made the western hall of the main gallery the exhibition space for Zhang Xiaogang and the other Southwestern artists. But, it was outside the expectations of Zhang Xiaogang and the others, that within three hours of the opening of the show on February 5, 1989, Xiao Lu from Hangzhou had fired a pistol at the installation titled Dialog (Duihua), which was her joint work in the show with her boyfriend Tang Song, and the museum management announced the closure of the exhibition. After it re-opened, someone sent an anonymous letter, claiming that there was a bomb inside the Museum, and the exhibition was again halted. The environment created by the police presence led people and the media to focus on the political possibilities raised by the event, as well as on such slogans as Wang Guangyi’s “clean up humanist enthusiasm”. This was a time when there was a wave of “Mao Zedong enthusiasm” in society; the CPC Central Committee was staging a large exhibition of paintings at the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall to commemorate the 95th anniversary of Mao Zedong’s birth, which had been visited by Hua Guofeng and some of Mao Zedong’s children and relatives, workers, and leaders of the Communist Party and national leaders. Apparently, Wang Guangyi’s sensitive slogan was also effective advertising among the audience and media for his work titled Mao Zedong: Black Grid (Mao Zedong: Hei ge). People also loved to discuss the bold and unrestrained performance works in the exhibition: Wang Deren scattering condoms, Li Shan giving “foot baths”, Zhang Nian “hatching eggs”, and Wu Shanzhuan “selling shrimp” inside the Gallery; few in the audience were paying too much attention to paintings that expressed inner anxieties and pain. In fact, the “China Modern Art Exhibition” opened and closed in messy circumstances. After Li Xianting heard that Xiao Lu and Tang Song had fired two shots, he was excited and stimulated, because the gunfire was consistent with his mentality at that time (“after a long period of suppression, hope finally breaks out”, Li Xianting), whereas Gao Minglu was stunned and enraged by the shooting, because this was not in his prior planning nor would he have permitted it.
Of course, critics were concerned also paid attention to the paintings in the “China Modern Art Exhibition”. Apart from Geng Jianyi’s Second State (Di’er zhuangtai) which attracted interest for its abandonment of intention and Wang Guangyi’s Mao Zedong: Black Grid. Pan Dehai’s Corncob (Baomi) series was also considered to be an important work in the exhibition. In fact, the earliest works in the Corncob series had been shown in the “88 Southwest Modern Art Exhibition”, and at the same time as critics noted that it satisfied the interest of the unconscious, Pan Dehai was also presenting critics with a symbolic experiment appropriate to the discussion on artistic language that had been going on since 1987: How could art with a spiritual orientation have different features at different levels of language? In contrast, the exhibited art works of Mao Xuhui and Zhang Xiaogang attracted no interest among the critics. Zhang was quite resentful about the reception his art and that of his friends received at the exhibition; he felt that a newly enhanced mood of opportunism and grandstanding had come to the avant-garde art scene. He felt strongly that there was nothing wrong with the values he had acquired at an early age and especially after graduating, but in these more restless times, people were gradually beginning to lose interest in some of the ideas he cherished. After returning to Chengdu from Beijing, he poured out everything he felt about the “China Modern Art Exhibition” to Mao Xuhui:
We live in such a crazy era of meaninglessness! Seeing our irascible fellow artists at the 89 Modern Art Exhibition, I felt there was nothing I could say, but I didn’t feel that my silence meant that I was timid. For me, I just felt isolated. I feel that there was no way we can relate to those simple minded “vandals”, to the power-hungry nihilists, to those who try to keep art away from the human soul but close to a teasing visual style, or to the mercenaries trying to get close the people with money.[53]
Mao Xuhui’s reply to Zhang Xiaogang was also dispirited:
It’s difficult for us to become part of the avant-garde with only our paintings. In the ’85 art movement, we were the avant-garde and now only a few of us are part of it. We’re simply look like historical figures; the new people are downstairs, and the ones who create incidents are our bastard offspring, and whether we like it or not that’s how history will probably record us.[54]
For Zhang Xiaogang, the most direct benefit of the “China Modern Art Exhibition” was that it gave him the opportunity to sell some of his works; he sold several works of the Lost Dreams series of works in this exhibition to the cultural counselor at the Spanish Embassy in China, Inma Puy, and to a French buyer. At this time, an American and the Chinese businessman who had largely funded the China Modern Art Exhibition, Song Wei, together purchased the triptych Eternal Love, and then splitting the work, one taking one painting and the other taking two of the paintings. These sales were a big help for the struggling Zhang Xiaogang and Tang Lei.
The social and political crisis was moving closer to an explosion. At the time of the “China Modern Art Exhibition” on 16 February, the political activist Chen Jun held a press conference for foreign journalists at “JJ’s Art Bar”, where he distributed Fang Lizhi’s letter to Deng Xiaoping as well as a letter signed by thirty-three persons, including Chen Jun, addressed to the National People’s Congress Standing Committee and the CPC Central Committee calling for an amnesty and the release of Wei Jingsheng and other political prisoners. On 22 March, Fang Lizhi, Li Shuxian, and Wang Dan presided over the 12th “Democracy Salon” at Peking University, at which a lecturer gave a talk on the theme of “new authoritarianism and democracy” and the words “democracy” and “human rights” became words frequently heard at these salons. On 5 April, at the 14th “Democracy Salon”, 56 students signed a petition presenting to the school their views on politics and democracy. Wang Dan urged at the time: “All intellectuals feel that something will happen this year, and I hope that at the present time, we all unite”. On April 15, China Central Television broadcast the announcement by the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee that Hu Yaobang had passed away. That night, a big character poster appeared at Peking University that read: “We demand the replacement of the incompetent government, the overthrow of the autocratic monarchy, and the establishment of democracy”. On 16 April, wreaths appeared at the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square and on 18 April, more than one thousand students from Peking University began walking from the school gate to Tiananmen Square. Thereafter, in the name of honoring Hu Yaobang, the numbers of students taking part in parades entering the Square increased daily, and the Square began to fill with up to 100,000 people, shouting various political slogans. On 22 April, three students submitted a petition to Premier Li Peng at the East Gate of the Great Hall of the People, and by this time the events in Tiananmen Square were attracting global media attention. On 25April, “CCTV news” aired the next day’s People’s Daily editorial, titled “We Must Take a Clear-cut Stand against the Unrest”, but the editorial’s characterization of the student movement as counter-revolutionary only aroused massive opposition and further even larger demonstrations. On 28 March, the “Autonomous Association of Beijing Higher School Students” consisting of representatives of more than twenty colleges and universities was established and more frequent activism and political adventures followed. By 19 May, the Square still contained nearly 100,000 people, but that night the Politburo decided to impose martial law the next day. From 20 May to 1:30 A.M. on 4 June, when troops cleared Tiananmen Square, the political events in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square had spread to every city in China and the country had entered a full-scale political crisis.
On 14 May 1989 Zhang Xiaogang had held his first solo exhibition at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts Gallery and in the exhibition were more than forty paintings completed in the previous two years. However, on the afternoon of the opening, as a result of the political turmoil in Beijing, the student demonstrations, and the closure of the schools, his first solo exhibition was cancelled, and he and other teachers joined the students demonstrating and shouting slogans calling for the government to take action against profiteering officials and to punish corruption harshly.
In December, Zhang Xiaogang held an exhibition at a party organized by the Spanish cultural attaché Inma Puy, and even though he sold dozens of paintings at very low prices, this nevertheless made many of his artist friends envious.
Like most of his friends, Zhang Xiaogang in the second half of 1989 felt continually depressed, and in a letter to his fellow student Yang Qian, then in the United States, he wrote: “I am often woken by nightmares and I am suffocated by the great tragedy. On the one hand, I have a clear awareness of reality and, on the other hand, I enter a murky abyss when I think about the future”. After complaining about the problems of the country and of schools, he writes at the end of the letter: “Sometimes I feel this generation probably doesn’t really have a purpose in this life, but in the face of destiny I am unwilling to go under and maybe this is my fate”.[55] At the end of the year, Zhang Xiaogang told Yang Qian once again about his personal feelings:
The 1990s are about to begin. In this the last decade of the century, people cannot escape their sense of fear. I often have nightmares, added to which it has rained all winter in Chongqing, and the power outages make people sometimes lose all hope. I look forward to the end of this cold, wet winter.[56]
In 1990, Professor Yi Dan, who lived behind Zouma Road, and Lü Peng were writing A History of Chinese Modern Art: 1979-1989; Zhang Xiaogang explained, in a reply to Yi Dan’s request for slides of his works, how the teachers in Huangjueping in Chongqing were feeling:
It is now the 1990s. On the last night of 1989 we all gathered at Ye Yongqing’s home and were feeling depressed; we chatted aimlessly talking about everything from the weather to Tuo brand alcohol winning an award or something. After listening to the New Year rung in, we all went home to sleep. For me, over the past few months, sleep and nightmares have become synonymous. I believe that everyone is waiting for something terrible to happen, maybe an earthquake, perhaps a goddess coming down to earth.[57]
The artist’s mental state was clearly different from previously when he was “in search of that other existence”.
In early 1989, Zhang Xiaogang painted a picture titled River of Amnesia (Wangchuan), and this was a further development of his examination of themes of “amnesia” and “memory” in the subconscious which he had pursued ever since 1984, as well as a treatment of the themes of death, but if one wanted to remember the past and was nostalgic for the old days, then one might fall for a millennium into the depths of samsara and never be reincarnated. In the end, what purposes did nostalgia and amnesia serve? This was something about which Zhang Xiaogang was uncertain. He simply felt that people faced with this choice needed to contemplate the question: the red female figure in the painting sitting on a rock beside the River Lethe was deep in meditation and each of the heads in the river were in dialogue with the head in flight. Is forgetting ultimately a form of retention? Each creature must sooner or later confront this problem. This theme clearly reflects a deeply depressed mood, but the artist himself was fully convinced that poetry was necessarily a response to depression; Zhang Xiaogang’s Lost Dreams series comprised such poems, reminding and warning people of the persistence of this question. 1990 was the third year of the marriage of Zhang Xiaogang and Tang Lei. Full expression is given to their charmed relationship in many works in the Lost Dreams series; those dream landscapes replete with symbolism or the poems filled with imagery expressed Zhang Xiaogang’s inner satisfaction. Yet, the social environment in the second half of 1988 was in fact ominous; incidents at the “Modern Art Exhibition” in February 1989 further heightened the artist’s inner tension. After 15 April, the news of the death of Hu Yaobang and everything that happened in Tiananmen Square in Beijing became the focus of concern for most modern artists and critics. The dramatic changes in politics and society even affected Zhang’s emotions and inner feelings. Therefore, around April, the artist’s Lost Dreams series was nearing its end and in the paintings, in which the subjects and themes obviously started out warm and pastoral in tone, symbols of death and suffering began to appear in the compositions. Before May’s Lost Dreams works were completed, the artist was talking about issues of life and death, and at this time what was motivating his concern with this serious theme derived from his reading. In his compositions obvious images of Christ appeared, or he would put Buddha and Christ together, or have his own image overlap with that of Christ. The titles of these works began to sound prophetic - The Rite of Spring (Chun zhi ji), The Road of Martyrs (Xundaozhe zhi lu), Man Wearing a Crown of Thorns (Tou dai jingguan de nanzi), and The Ascension of the Head (Shengteng de toulu). These paintings were completed before May and should be regarded as the result of an intense and disturbing reality increasingly bearing down on the artist. The title of The Rite of Spring hinted that Zhang Xiaogang viewed reality with anxiety and anticipation, and it might also contain a suggestion of “martyrdom” or suffering necessitated by the rite of spring, enacted in Stravinsky’s ballet of that name. By July, the artist was making a collage painting from overlapping pieces of paper titled Last Will and Testament (Yiyan); in the painting we see a young man’s bandaged head and anyone in China at that time would immediately think of this in the context of the students’ hunger strike in Tiananmen Square which was a site of impending tragedy. Last Will and Testament is obviously symbolic: all unfinished business in times of crisis and anxiety can only constitute memories that will be ineradicable. From June to early September, Zhang Xiaogang remained almost constantly in his home in Chengdu, and Tang Lei would prepare the “altar” on which he would produce his new works. What was certain was that his art was once again undergoing change: he started out from dreaming in that “search for the other existence” but that dreaming brought him back to harsh reality, as he returned to the real tragedy that had taken place in the world around him. In July 1992 Zhang Xiaogang wrote a brief summary of his personal artistic history, in which he described his period of “the search for that other existence”：
There is no escape from reality; all the contradictions and suffering that conditioned my creative work from 1986 to 1988 could not be dispelled and became an increasingly irresistible force that would buffet my dormant soul. My preliminary understanding of my life and times, combined with a certain sense of foreboding, led me to begin to feel that in the clash between my soul and reality the other shore seemed to recede even further. What ultimately is “art”? If it is gradually beginning to grow distant and alienated from life, becoming a form of decoration or some cold and brittle ivory tower, then it is close to extinction. It would no longer have spiritual significance in my life. For me, “art” and “life” were basically one and the same, and how one engaged in “art” signified how one went on “living”. Art symbolized a spiritual character and embodied the full meaning of the concept of “life”. Before I came to this realization in the second half of 1989, I felt frozen when confronted by sanguine reality.[58]
This confession by the artist had been deeply influenced by the writings of Miguel de Unamuno whom he had read two years previously. Unlike the influence of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Sartre on Zhang Xiaogang, the ideas of Miguel de Unamuno played a significant role at various times in his life, or more correctly many of Miguel de Unamuno’s ideas were adopted by Zhang Xiaogang. In Mao Xuhui’s comments on art and life, as well as on the responsibility and mission of the artist, we frequently see statements similar to those of Miguel de Unamuno. This Spanish thinker had no metaphysical system, but stressed intuition and emotion, the direct experience of life, and the need to emotionally experience life’s real tragedies. In their earlier reading of 1986 and 1987, Mao Xuhui and Zhang Xiaogang became convinced of “the tragic sense of life” in human existence and they shared the view that since tragedy is constantly present in life, the resulting contradictions and conflicts in life are eternal and cannot be avoided. In order to obtain affirmation of the value of life, especially in an age when society and people were completely unaware of the existence and work of these young artists, they recognized the need to endure the pain and tragedy that might arise; they invariably discussed their own opinions and ideas as though they were “underground” artists, rather than legitimate artists. Zhang Xiaogang and his friends enjoyed this sense of tragedy and pain, because they had been led to believe that only by suffering could they accomplish their artistic mission and realize the true value of life. Zhang Xiaogang derived his values from different Western philosophers, thinkers, and writers; from the treatment of issues in the novels of Kafka, he derived his understanding of crime and punishment, reality and the surreal, and the relationships between despair and humor, horror and calmness, as in the conjunction of absurdity and horror at the end of The Trial: “But the hands of one of the gentlemen were laid on K.'s throat, while the other pushed the knife deep into his heart and twisted it there, twice. As his eyesight failed, K. saw the two gentlemen cheek by cheek, close in front of his face, watching the result. ‘Like a dog!’ he said, as if the shame of it should outlive him”. This K was also the K of The Castle, Kafka himself, and a self-portrait of the writer that Zhang Xiaogang could intimately understand.
Of course, it was obviously from the great artists in the history of art, European art in the main, that Zhang Xiaogang acquired his conviction that art expresses human destiny – in the works of Hieronymus Bosch, El Greco, Giorgione Chirico, James Sydney Ensor, René Magritte, Alberto Giacometti, and Balthus, and in the music of J. S. Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Shostakovich - to which the soul emotionally responds. He agreed with the explanation that everything flows from free will and the inevitable problems this entailed. Unamuno’s idea that the soul required the nourishment of religion though the rational mind had to resist religious ecstasy was also accepted by Zhang Xiaogang, because he had never really experienced religious ecstasy nor completely accepted the power of rationality. In 1984 Zhang Xiaogang plunged into a spiritual abyss, but his intuition and rationality led him towards quietude and reflection when the conditions were right; in 1986 he was drawn towards humanity’s “ultimate concerns” or the Buddhist “Mahayana” in his intoxication with writing symbolist poetry, but when in 1989 real pain and tragedy was played out before his eyes, he returned once more to the themes of “suffering” and “tragedy”, but unlike in 1986, his pessimism began to find its artistic source in the feelings and experience of reality, and from changes in the material world he now grasped life’s pain and tragedy, feelings which he expressed in his works. From the second half of 1989 onwards, Zhang Xiaogang gradually came to believe that the flesh and soul are one. As Zhang Xiaogang expressed it in one of his last letters to Mao Xuhui in 1989: “If our ‘old Cossack’ spirit is exhausted, does it matter what artistic form we choose? Having lost our souls, can we talk about artistic style and completion?” He also told Mao Xuhui: “My state of mind recently seems to be returning to past feelings. I’m listening again to Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, and have the works of El Greco, Sartre, and Miguel de Unamuno beside me”.[59] What was different from how he dealt with the soul back in 1982 was that at this time Zhang Xiaogang’s soul was consciously concerned with being close to reality.
Indeed, in his confessions Zhang Xiaogang did not regard his earlier “Lost Dreams” series as a mistake, but felt that his internal conflict and pain were not dispelled by the images he created, so that his soul itself lacked supporting values. According to Miguel de Unamuno’s ideas, life’s inner joy derives from self-analysis, and true religious feeling comes from the parallel efforts of the emotions and the will. The concern with cultivating compassion and wisdom, what is called tragedy, derive from the experience of the reality of endured suffering and pain; otherwise, the sleeping soul is of no consequence. In July 1989 he completed the work titled The Heads of Spring in April (Siyue chun de toulu) which confirmed his earlier sense of mortality; the artist believed that he had fulfilled his own prophecy. Later, he found himself irresistibly drawn to collage methods to express his need to use his intellect, will, and emotions to fend off reality, and it was in this year that he completed his Trilogy of Black: Terror, Meditation, and Melancholy (Heise sanbuqu: Jingkong, mingxiang, youyu). Firstly, the title alluded to literature and art history; the meditation and melancholy referred to the title and subject of Albrecht Dürer’s famous woodblock print, as well as pointing to Zhang’s current psychological situation: meditation and melancholy, as well as “terror”, were right there before his eyes. The artist continued to use symbols and images, but now he was using everyday items – newspapers, playing cards, and envelopes, that he hoped would express how he was no longer on that eternal other shore or cultivating his symbolist poetry, but concerned with life’s contingent reality of “madness and malignancy” and with the role of the individual in this. He expressed death, outlined in his work as death occasioned by a dagger, and he used collage and cold grey pigments to create a heavy feel that symbolized reality; he used babies that seemed to be dead to express his despair about life, and he used red cloth, amputated limbs, and knives to symbolizes the tragedy of reality. It is worth noting that in these times of sorrow and despair, Zhang Xiaogang did not turn too much to writing; a little like Max Beckman, Zhang Xiaogang did his utmost to ply extremely controlled brush strokes, as though the artist was aware that he was obliged to exert rationality to suppress the outflow of emotions and, in the observation of absurdity and mystery, a cold and calm detachment was required. Now that the gates of hell had been opened, the tragic sense of life could emerge in the conflicts and contradictions of life and death. However, in order to show the feel of the heavy pressure exerted by that underworld of hell, the artist used the collage style of Fundació Antoni Tàpies. For a time thereafter, the art and techniques of Tàpies were copied and borrowed by Zhang Xiaogang, who completed works that combined oil, canvas, paper, cloth, and other materials; he continued using this new approach into the early 1990s. “Black Trilogy” was not lyric poetry, but rather a “problem” novel raising questions, like Kafka’s Trial, and the artist saw himself as “K” placed in an absurd and unruly real world threatened by death.
In 1990, Zhang Xiaogang completed a painting titled New Year’s Eve (Chuxiye), in which he sought to present calm emotions through a symbolic self-portrait yet as a predictive act. In the same year, Zhang also just completed a series of devil’s heads titled Duplicated Spaces (Chongfu kongjian), as well as The Abyss (Shenyuan ji). Both groups of paintings depicted souls in hell. The works in the “Duplicated Spaces” series created using the collage method were mostly completed in the first half of the year and were a continuation of the Black Trilogy; the artist’s emotions remain in an extreme state of tension and the influence of Tàpies is clearly visible. The devil’s heads serve as symbols of events and characters; as well as being symbols of the self; they are symbols of both life and death, a composition into which the artist has inserted previously printed copybook characters, thereby rendering the emotionally charged picture even more complex. At this time, Zhang appeared be constrained and subject to control he could not shake off. He described his mental state in the following letter of November 1990:
Upon my return to Huangjueping from Chengdu, I continued to breathe the air of Chengdu and painted five oil paintings that were predominantly black and white. I applied the undiluted and thick paint with a knife directly to the canvas, and the surface of the picture still revealed a collage of pieces of canvas of different textures and colors (black, red, and brown), but they all looked more square than the paintings I had been completing in Chengdu and the surface seemed to covered with a grid resembling the bars of a prison cell. Those barely smiling heads plunged in contemplation seemed to have an independent existence within the compositions, suggesting either human heads and faces, or those of wolves or goats. Their fangs were like icicles.[60]
This was a mystery play as performed in Steppenwolf; Zhang Xiaogang was like Hesse’s Haller, caught in the dead of night, in the driving wind and cold rain, with no passers-by, gazing at the darkened road and the blurred neon advertising sign in the distance, which he slowly discovered was a flickering sign beckoning him to enter the “Magic Theatre” closed to ordinary people. This is somewhat curious, but Zhang Xiaogang was not attempting to reveal an emotional purpose; he simply wanted to bring his feelings under control and these feelings were limited to one theme rather but they were not the expression of simple emotions; Zhang Xiaogang therefore did not regard these paintings of his as Expressionism, and he wanted these works to suggest such artists as El Greco, Chirico, Odilon Redon, and Francis Bacon, rather than early German Expressionists, such as Kokoschka. At this time, his vigilantly paranoid state of mind surfaced once again and as in the earlier Lost Dreams series the expression of “life” was symbolized through signifiers of “death”.
In preparing to embark on his Duplicated Spaces series, Zhang Xiaogang had sketched some minor compositions in a sketchbook presented to him at an exhibition of peasant paintings staged in 1983 by the Yunnan branch of the China Artists’ Association. In this volume we see devil’s heads or people with severed heads. These were all ideas sketched out by the artist that he would later turn into paintings. On one page there are several ideas for compositions: in one we find that devil’s heads fill the whole composition, which appears to be a distorted variant of Luo Zhongli’s painting Father (Fuqin), while another composition seems to be borrowed from Liu Chunhua’s iconic work Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan (Mao zhuxi qu Anyuan), and in the lower part of the paper goats’ heads are the subject of the composition. These three small compositions clearly indicate images that long remained as ineradicable memories and impressions in the artist’s imagination; the first two compositions were strong memories that greatly influenced him, and incorporating them into his compositions he was converting them into a judgment and representation of both history and reality; the goats’ heads were an assemblage of his early and recent experiences. There is another page with a composition around a large head on which the artist wrote the words “Chinese humor”, and perhaps the lower part of the composition was intended to represent Mao Zedong. As in his earlier thinking about composition, Zhang Xiaogang hinted that he would use cloth and newspapers to compose a collage in the style of Tàpies. There were two pages of sketches which do not seem to have satisfied Zhang Xiaogang until a sketch of another page provided the idea for completing his conception: firstly, his composition comprised a box or frame enclosing a human figure with a head separated from a torso, a goat with lilies in its mouth and a hand floating in the air; in the lower part of the work we see the outline of a head and a head placed on a book or a page, while a piece of cloth floats in the air above the head. Here he explores the theme of Chinese historical problems (represented by the history concealed in the painting titled Chairman Mao on the Road to Anyuan completed in 1967 and the questions of history and reality concealed in the work Father) and dreaming (the head detached from the body and the floating hands and skulls). Zhang Xiaogang had already succeeded in transposing artistic problems from the realm of metaphysics to the sequential order of reality, and he was beginning to sweep aside his earlier artistic concepts and to acknowledge two tendencies – the unconsciousness and Weltanschauung (world-view) . Thus when defining art he could now express himself in two different ways: in his sketchbooks he wrote that “art should be a part of life” and “art should be a type of spontaneous love”; elsewhere he wrote that “art should distance itself from nature” and that “art should utilize its cultural backdrop”. Even though the artist was long fascinated by expressionist methods [WHY A QUESTION MARK?], he later used memory and the cultural background in an increasingly forceful manner in his actual works, despite the fact that the “Duplicated Spaces” series did not obviously contain images ion this vein.
The materials and techniques of the Abyss series were a return to Lost Dreams; in light of the psychological relaxation of the artist’s previously stressed and anxious state, time allowed him to move gradually away from scenes of grief and pain, and he became determined to “confront harsh reality with conviction, and to comprehend the existence of the realm of tragedy and death from a positive perspective. Depicting the tragedy of life and the grandeur of death revealed the absurdity and the mystery of existence”.[61] Thus, it was with a poetic temperament that he returned to the “Abyss” series, and in the sixth work in that series the artist’s contemplative head supported by a hand accounts for the main space in the composition; below the head are books thrown open, and at the rear of the work we see a standing figure without a head that suggests one of the terracotta warriors in Emperor Qin Shihuang’s mausoleum, while in the distance a hanging finger points to an enormous head that seems to evoke everything that demands our constant contemplation, regardless of whether it belongs to the past or the present, or whether it is historical reality or fantasy. The artist describes “the sense of absurdity generated by inherited suffering, contradictions, and duplication”; these words reveal how the artist is beginning, intentionally and unintentionally, to project his own feelings into the history that can be examined, in the hope that through the description of history he can explain the origins of everything now present and review his own problems that emerge. He was beginning to note the simplicity and delicacy of “romantic feelings”, and he spoke of how cruel reality had awakened him from “empty idealism”. Both the Duplicated Spaces and Abyss series mark Zhang Xiaogang’s transition from fantastic allegory (myth) and symbolist poetry in the direction of attention and concern for reality and history. This was a process of rational thinking and if one maintained continuity of reflection when contemplating real issues, then historical problems would surface sooner or later, and before long, these historical problems could ultimately acquire distinctive form.
The Notebook (Shouji) series was the major work completed by Zhang Xiaogang in 1991, and the series continued the themes of Duplicated Spaces and the Abyss series, namely the discussion about life and death. However, in his methods and approach, Zhang Xiaogang undertook further exploration and experimentation, wanting to find a unique language and aesthetic style, one that could more aptly demonstrate what he called the contradictions and conflict between the body and “ghosts”. In the first work in the Notebook series he relates his portrait to the exploration of problems and to his earlier white sheets, and although the space in the work has atmospheric location, the artist is still calmly and coldly outlining the narrative of his soul. In the second work in the Notebook series titled Letters from Afar (Yuanfang de laixin), Zhang Xiaogang covered a table with familiar boxes, using them to symbolize an altar, and positioned an enormous head at the center of the composition; in the background there is a doorway leading to hell, reminding people of the sheets in the hospital several years earlier that were arranged to the left and right of the head, and as in many earlier works, the artist used lithopone emulsion as white pigment to create a textured foundation, which gives the picture a strong appeal. An important element that is fully emphasized in this work is the beam of light shining down from above. In fact, the head in this painting is also an extension of earlier content, being for example an extension of the head in his 1990 work titled Black Trilogy (Heise sanbuqu), and all these images are simply constantly repeated images or self-portraits of the soul and mind of the artist, signifying how the artist can never shake off the problems that bedevil his philosophy of life. The warmth and strength of the light at this time not only creates an illusory division in the space of the composition, but makes the figures of his characters more complex and solid; in the course of the night the candles on the tables have burnt out and the warm morning sunshine has driven out the loneliness of the one who is alone.[62] This is the flash of aesthetic clarity that will illuminate Zhang Xiaogang’s later Big Family (Da jiating) series. In two early works in the 1989 Lost Dreams series – The Last Supper (Zuihou de wancan) and Turning Page 135 (Fankai di 135 ye), we see the light of God, and in that instant of time, the artist wants to tell us his reading of the story of man’s origins and destination. In 1990, the light that figures prominently in his Abyss works is also warm and mystical. Yet now, the source of the light is neither God nor the world of the other shore; its source lies closer to the reality of the artist’s inner desires and beliefs, as the artist explained：
Art, for me, is most fascinating for its particular “fuzziness”, or what might be described as its “intermediate state”. Because art draws me closer to projections of reality in my mind – where they seem to be indistinct fleshy orbs that weigh me down and dispel my breath, I can fully appreciate how it embodies universal significance.[63]
Zhang Xiaogang remained fond of metaphor, and the painting titled Letter from Afar expressed a necessary aspect of his life; at that time, letters were almost the only way in which he could communicate thoughts and feelings with his closest friends; his sense of loneliness sprang from anticipating the receipt of letters and writing them, and this was a defining aspect of Zhang Xiaogang’s character and spirit. In the group of paintings titled One Week’s Notes (Yizhou shouji), Zhang Xiaogang related his own story: on the first day, his body and head are separate, and his head (the artist himself) begins to gaze at his body; on the second day, the body independently finds the head and attempts to converse with his soul; on the third day, the head seems to have been overpowered by the body, or at least the body is now unhurried; on the fourth day, the body props up the hand to write a letter, and the head that is the soul watches the body at work, writing the letter that the soul wants to write; on the fifth day, the body and the head seem to combine, as though thinking still requires the assistance of the soul; on the sixth day, the body begins to read, seeking out the problems of existence; on the seventh day, the body spreads out the arms, and behind it the red coloring symbolizes bloodshed and death. This description of the soul drawn from the imagination is fully used by the artist, who he is able to ride freely in the space of his imagination and re-arrange his body and soul however he chooses. It is like Kafka’s writing with its juxtaposition of horror and humor, and of absurdity and tranquility. But it is quite clear that in 1991 Zhang Xiaogang had already recovered from the fear and anxiety occasioned by China’s political [I THINK ADDING THESE TWO WORDS IS APPROPRIATE HERE] tragedy; music like Brahms’ German Requiem was like a palliative that treated the paranoia of the artist and his friends.[64] Again he could calmly exercise his reason to ponder the questions that constantly troubled him; his sensitivity to everyday life had not diminished in the slightest, but he now seemed to have distanced himself from his source of fantasy, and he no longer seemed to cling to the symbols to which he had clung to persistently for so long. He said that when he returned to reality from the world of the other shore he began to “seek images that conveyed a greater sense of quietude in the course of further refining and purifying symbols”,[65] and he became totally immersed in questions of reality. He wrote in a letter dated 25 June, 1991：
I began to conceive of this group of works at the beginning of this year and I have tentatively titled it Private Notes (Shouji). This series treats human issues (reality, history, and the mind), and those souls who have been twisted by circumstances. The most authentic aspects of their lives can only be recorded in their diaries and letters, “historical records” that can never be known by others. In painting this series, I thought about my old friend Dostoevsky and his Notes from a Dead House, which took its title and form from “private notes”. For me, the twentieth century is a vastly absurd, terrifying, and insane riddle, or a weird black circle that constantly repeats the past. If our generation has achieved anything, I believe it is suffering. Struggling In loneliness with “death” has become an integral aspect of our daily lives.[66]
[1] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter to Zhou Chunya (3 March 1982)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996 (Shiyi yu jiyi: Zhang Xiaogang shuxin ji, 1981-1996), Peking University Press, 2010, p.33.
[2] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter to Zhou Chunya (3 March 1982)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996, Peking University Press, 2010, p.33.
[3] Zhang Xiaogang, Autobiography (Zishu), 2014.
[4] Nie Rongqing, The Colors of the Kunming Moat (Hucheng-he de yanse), People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 2015.
[5] It goes without saying that seeking out female companions for conversation and carousing was a favorite activity among young Chinese male artists in the 1980s.
[6] In the 1980s, writings on aesthetics by Li Zehou and Gao Ertai had a wide following in China.
[7] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhou Chunya to Zhang Xiaogang (18 February 1982)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996, Peking University Press, 2010, p.29.
[8] “Big Mao” (Da Mao): The nickname of Mao Xuhui used by his friends.
[9] Zhang Xiaogang, Autobiography (2014).
[10] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter to Zhou Chunya from Zhang Xiaogang (25 July 1982)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996, Peking University Press, 2010, p.42.
[11] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter to Zhou Chunya from Zhang Xiaogang (24 December 1982)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996, Peking University Press, 2010, p.47.
[12] Zhang Xiaogang, Autobiography (2014).
[13] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter to Zhou Chunya from Zhang Xiaogang (14 November 1983)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996, Peking University Press, 2010, p.55
[14] In The Colors of the Kunming Moat, Nie Rongqing recalls how Zhang Xiaogang’s purchases of books in the bookstores at that time were emblematic of the enormous thirst for knowledge felt by people in that era:
The middle school where I was studying was just across the Panlong River from
Zhang Xiaogang’s dormitory and my family home was also on the banks of that river. So Zhang Xiaogang and I more or less lived in the same area. At that time, in the district where we lived, there was only one Xinhua Bookstore, in Tangzi Lane. I would often bump into Zhang Xiaogang in that bookstore, although he cannot recall the first time we met there; we so looked up to him but he didn’t notice me. Whenever he was buying books I would sneak around to see what titles he was readily. I remember using money I had saved to buy Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude after seeing that he had bought it. One time it was such fun seeing him buy books that I ended up buying a whole satchel of books. I later learned it was his pay day.
[15] Nie Rongqing, The Colors of the Kunming Moat.
[16] Ye Yongqing, “Letter to Someone”, Time Traveler: Writings of Ye Yongqing (Shijian de chuanxingzhe: Ye Yongqing wenji), China Youth Publishing House, 2010, p.40.
[17] Zhang Xiaogang, Autobiography (2014).
[18] Zhang Xiaogang, Autobiography (2014).
[19] Copied out by Zhang Xiaogang on 1 August 2007.
[20] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter to the Leaders of the Troupe from Zhang Xiaogang (Summer 1985)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996, Peking University Press, 2010, p.70.
[21] Mao Xuhui, “Memories of the ‘New Figuratives’” (Huiyi ‘Xin Juxiang’), 1996
[22] Mao Xuhui, “Memories of the ‘New Figuratives’” (1996).
[23] Zhang Xiaogang, Autobiography (2014). Zhang Long wrote, in a letter of 20 March1985 to Mao Xuhui and Zhang Xiaogang, that to ensure that the exhibition would be allowed to go ahead by the authorities that several of Zhang Xiaogang’s “demonic” works and of Mao Xuhui’s “sexy” works not be included in the show. In an unpublished letter to Zhang Xiaogang, Mao Xuhui and Pan Dehai of 15 May 1985, Hou Wenyi wrote: “Regarding the name of the exhibition, I feel that it is okay to call it the New Figurative Paintings or Art Exhibition, because for one thing most domestic exhibitions of new style paintings call themselves ‘modern’ which is pretty vague and theoretically insipid, given that most of the content is imitative, so people might think our exhibition is like that. Instead we should be bold and take the first step by clearly stating our claims, even if our work is not mature”. In the letter Hou Wenyi also discussed the policy they should follow regarding the works to be exhibited: “Zhang Long and I both think that directly descriptive and excessively sexual work should not be exhibited at this time. Shanghai provides a good staging point, as well as being the country’s largest city and a window on the outside world, so we have to take it easy”.
[24] Mao Xuhui, “Memories of the ‘New Figuratives’” (1996).
[25] On the invitation cards for the first Exhibition, the term “New Figurative” appeared, and in the advertising for the exhibition in Nanjing the term was also used. The subsequent second, third, and fourth exhibitions would all openly use the term “New Figuratives”.
[26] Mao Xuhui, “Memories of the ‘New Figuratives’” (1996).
[27] Mao Xuhui describes the situation after the close of the exhibition:
At the close of the exhibition, money was very tight, so we had to remove all oil paintings from their stretchers and frames and roll up the canvases to ship them to Shanghai and Yunnan respectively. The seventy or eighty frames were a boon for their painter friends in Nanjing; Zhang Long continued his studies in Shanghai, while Hou Wenyi returned to Shanghai in preparation for his imminent departure to the United States as a student. Mao [Xuhui] and Pan [Dehai] returned to Kunming by train, but they felt like the fisherman in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea who had played the big fish, but returned with only a pile of bones. (“Report on the New Figurative Painting Exhibition”, 1987
[28] The Zhuhai Conference, jointly sponsored by China Art News and the Zhuhai [Chinese] Painting Academy, was held 15-19 August 1986. The Conference used slideshow talks to exhibit more than 300 works. Owing to the weak “official” nature of the meeting, most of those attending the Conference were representatives of young artists’ groups from all over China, and even though official representatives including Shao Dazhen, the editor of Fine Arts magazine and the artists Zhan Jianjun and Wen Lipeng did attend the event, these moderate older artists did not hinder the young people organizing and planning the work of the Conference. Gao Minglu therefore emphasized the de facto private nature of the Conference: “This was the first seminar at which young artists selected their own works and evaluated their own artistic activities, and so the clash between different artistic views made the event seem overwhelming tense”. (See: Gao Minglu, The 85’ Art Movement, Guangxi Normal University Press, 2008, p.323.)
[29] Meishu Sichao (Art Trends), 1987:1, p.20.
[30] Nie Rongqing in The Colors of the Kunming Moat (Hucheng-he de yanse) has described Mao Xuhui’s circumstances on returning to Kunming:
In the summer the “trainee teacher” Zhang Xiaogang returned from Chongqing to Kunming for his vacation. One evening in July, we were all gathered in Zhang Xiaogang’s dormitory at the song and dance troupe, waiting for Mao Xuhui to get back from Zhuhai and tell us everything that happened at the Zhuhai Conference.
I remember that it was a scorching hot night and there were a lot of people in the room. When Mao Xuhui arrived, room was made for him to sit on Zhang Xiaogang’s bed, and his excitement was even more intense than the heat that night. He told the group about every event at the Zhuhai Conference, and his account was highly charged. Of course, for Mao Xuhui, as an ordinary person at that time, Zhuhai, then at the forefront of China’s reform and opening up, seemed as thrilling as the “foreign” cities of Hong Kong and Macao.
At that time, Mao Xuhui seemed like a missionary preaching. His audience was not limited to Zhang Xiaogang and this circle of friends; he went to the Yunnan Academy of Fine Arts, where he reported the news from the Zhuhai Conference to friends including Jun Wu, Liu Yong, Li Jiandong, Qu Xinwen, Ma Xiangsheng, and Su Xinhong, urging them to stage an exhibition. Mao Xuhui at that time was often telling people: “Now is the time for the whole country to act! We must act on it now!” He reminded me of the leading labor activist in the movie titled Da Langtao Sha (Breakers on the Shore) who said in a speech at the climax of the action: “The workers of Changsha have risen up as have the workers of Wuhan, so what are you waiting for?” The atmosphere in the 1980s was similar. When Mao Xuhui went to the Yunnan Academy of Fine Arts, he was suddenly the focus of attention of all the young teachers there, and his call to them to “act” now soon resulted in the staging, even earlier than the New Figurative Exhibition in Kunming, of the “Southern Barbarian Exhibition” at which performances saw a guitar brutally smashed, beds carried into the exhibition, and the local beginnings of luridly colored exaggerated paintings and the display of installation art. Su Xinhong even installed a pile of grass to serve as a religious altar.
[31] Mao Xuhui explains this as follows:
In terms of the sequence, this should have been the third exhibition in the series but, because of problems securing a hall, the preparatory work dragged on until after the third exhibition was actually held. (“Report on the New Figurative Painting Exhibition”, 1987)
[32] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter to Ye Yongqing and Wife from Zhang Xiaogang (1 December 1986)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996, Peking University Press, 2010, p.94.
[33] In 1987, Sichuan Fine Arts Publishing House published A Collection of Sketches of Zhang Xiaogang and Ye Yongqing (Zhang Xiaogang, Ye Yongqing suxie ji), and the sketches reflected the similar tastes of the two artists.
[34] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter to Zhou Chunya from Zhang Xiaogang (11 March 1986)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996, Peking University Press, 2010, p.77.
[35] Zhang Xiaogang, “Autobiography and Private Notes” (Zishu yu shouji), in He Guiyan, Anthology of Criticism of the “Sichuan Painting School”, 1976-2006 (1976-2006 “Sichuan huapai” piping wenji), Jilin Fine Arts Publishing House, 2007, p.271.
[36] Zhang Xiaogang, “Memories of Demons” (Dui mogui de jiyi), 1986.
[37] Apart from Mao Xuhui, Zhang Xiaogang, Pan Dehai, and Zhang Long, other members of this group were Ye Yongqing, Deng Qiyao, Su Jianghua, Mao Jie, Zhang Hua, and Zhai Wei, all from Kunming, and Ren Xiaolin and Cheng Xiaoyu from Guizhou, as well as Mou Heng and Yang Chunsheng from Chengdu. The group also included Zhou Chunya in Germany and Yang Qian in the United States.
[38] Zhang Xiaogang, “In Search of That Existence: Second Letter from a Dark Night” (Xunzhao nage cunzai: Lai zi yewan de di’er feng xin), Yunnan Art Newsletter (Yunnan meishu tongxun), 1987:1, p.8.
[39] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter to Mao Xuhui from Zhang Xiaogang (14 April 1987)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996, Peking University Press, 2010, p.109.
[40] Zhang Xiaogang wrote to Zhou Chunya on 26 June 1986: “For the summer holiday, I have more or less decided to go to Chengdu, but money is a problem. For the past two months I’ve been so poor that sometimes I haven’t been able to buy food, and there’s been no money extra. I heard that the department might give us some money at the end of the semester, but I doubt that it will be enough for us to go to Aba, given that the summer vacation is two months long”. Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter to Zhou Chunya from Zhang Xiaogang (26 June 1986)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996, Peking University Press, 2010, p.84.
[41] In April that year, Zhang Xiaogang gave the school written assurance, as was requested, that he would remain teaching at the school indefinitely, but later he initiated a correspondence regarding a transfer. In October he completed the formalities for transferring to the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. In a letter sent from Kunming to Ye Yongqing in Chongqing, letter Zhang Xiaogang wrote: “My transfer has gone smoothly, and everything should be finalized within a week”. (4 October 1986)
[42] Provided by Ye Yongqing.
[43] In January, the writer Wang Ruowang and Vice-Chairman of the Chinese Writers’ Association, Liu Binyan were both expelled from the Communist Party. Earlier, on 30 December, Deng Xiaoping told Hu Yaobang: “I read Fang Lizhi’s speech and it is not at all what a Communist would say. What are such people doing in the Party? It is not a question of discouraging them, but of expelling them”. Deng Xiaoping also talked about how the student demonstrations in recent years showed that the Party had not been clear about opposing bourgeois liberal thought and that it had not been determined in its attitude. “I have never given up my opposition to spiritual pollution, and I agree that the full text of my speech opposing bourgeois liberalization at the second plenary session should be included in my published works. Our opposition to bourgeois liberalization should continue for at least another 20 years”. (Deng Xiaoping Chronology [Deng Xiaoping nianpu], Central Documentation Publishing House, 2004, pp.1160-1162)
[44] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter to Mao Xuhui from Zhang Xiaogang (31 May 1987)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996, Peking University Press, 2010, pp.111-112.
[45] On 16 December 1981, Zhang Xiaogang wrote to his friend Mao Xuhui: “Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cezanne are the gods I admire most”. Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter to Mao Xuhui from Zhang Xiaogang (16 December 1981)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996, Peking University Press, 2010, p.17.
[46] This article was stirring, and the positive statements calling for “globalizing” the discussion were an attempt to allow economic issues to introduce political issues, so that the national crisis could be seen to be a problem of the political system and ideology. At the end of April, this radical position led to the newspaper being shut down by the authorities.
[47]Cui Wenhua ed., Discussion of “Elegy of the Yellow River” (Heshang lun), Culture and Arts Publishing House, 1988, p.42
[48] See: General Office of the Beijing Municipal Committee of the CPC ed., Record of the 1989 Suppression of the Counter-revolutionary Turmoil in Beijing (1989 Beijing zhizhi dongluan pingxi fangeming baoluan jishi), Beijing Daily Press, August 1989. A few months later, the political actions of the scholars and other intellectuals who participated in the June 4 political events inevitably prejudiced their political and intellectual positions.
[49]Guandao: A term for the practice whereby officials of State organs, organizations, enterprises, and institutions, operating under the dual-pricing system, used their power to leverage profits unlawfully by playing the (negotiated) market price off against the “set” price. The practice can be simply translated as “profiteering”.
[50] Liu Xiaobo, “At the Entrance to Hell: A Reassessment of Marxism” (Zai diyu de rukouchu: Dui Makesizhuyi de zai-jiantao), originally published in Liberation Monthly (Jiefang yuebao), 1989: 4, quoted in Zheng Wang and Ji Kuai ed., Liu Xiaobo: The Man and His Actions (Liu Xiaobo qi ren qi shi), China Youth Publishing House, 1989, p.105.
[51] Lü Peng and Yi Dan, The History of Modern Chinese Art:1979-1989 (Zhongguo xiandai yishu shi: 1979-1989), Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, 1992, p.167
[52] For example, as unofficial representatives, Zhang Xiaogang and the critic Wang Lin did not enjoy the same treatment as the other participants. For example, the official representatives were issued with meal tickets, while the unofficial representatives could only eat outside.
[53] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter to Mao Xuhui from Zhang Xiaogang (17 March 1989)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996, Peking University Press, 2010, pp.131-132.
[54] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter to Zhang Xiaogang from Mao Xuhui (23 March 1982)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996, Peking University Press, 2010, pp.132-133.
[55] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter to Yang Qian from Zhang Xiaogang (6 October 1989)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996, Peking University Press, 2010, pp.139-140.
[56] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Greeting Card to Yang Qian from Zhang Xiaogang (end of 1982)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996, Peking University Press, 2010, p.142.
[57] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter to Yi Dan from Zhang Xiaogang (9 January 1990)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996, Peking University Press, 2010, p.150.
[58] Zhang Xiaogang, “Autobiography and Private Notes”, in He Guiyan, Anthology of Criticism of the “Sichuan Painting School”, 1976-2006, Jilin Fine Arts Publishing House, 2007, p.273.
[59] “The old Cossacks” was the name the graduates of the classes of 1977 and 1978 at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts humorously used to refer to themselves, probably because they were subject to so many cultural influences and memories of Russia and the Soviet Union in their youth. Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter to Zhou Chunya from Zhang Xiaogang (18 December 1989)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996, Peking University Press, 2010, pp.144-145.
[60] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter to Lü Peng from Zhang Xiaogang (18 October 1990)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996, Peking University Press, 2010, p.158.
[61] Zhang Xiaogang, “Autobiography and Private Notes”, in He Guiyan, Anthology of Criticism of the “Sichuan Painting School”, 1976-2006, Jilin Fine Arts Publishing House, 2007, p.273.
[62] This oil painting was a variant of a work on paper of 1989 titled Duplicated Space: Room Number Two. The difference between the two works was that the1989 original highlighted how events could disturb the mind and cause insomnia, while the 1991 work depicted a symbol of mental reflection.
[63] Zhang Xiaogang, “Autobiography and Private Notes”, in He Guiyan, Anthology of Criticism of the “Sichuan Painting School”, 1976-2006, Jilin Fine Arts Publishing House, 2007, p.274. Zhang’s essay was rewritten in 1991.
[64] In a letter of 4 December 1990, Zhang Xiaogang told Mao Xuhui: “Yesterday I collected A German Requiem you sent me from the post office and I have already listened to it twice. As I write this letter to you, I am listening to it a third time”. Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter to Mao Xuhui from Zhang Xiaogang (4 December 1990)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996, Peking University Press, 2010, p.168.
[65] Written on 25 June 1991.
[66] Zhang Xiaogang, Lü Peng ed., “Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Friend (25 June 1991)”, Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence, 1981-1996, Peking University Press, 2010, p.185. The letter was first published in Artists’ Digest, 1993:11, p.327.