The Temptation of Giorgio de Chirico: Zhang Zhaoying Painting Exhibition
The Historical context of Zhang Zhaoying's Painting
By 1988, the year Zhang Zhaoying was born, the Guangzhou modernist group Southern Artists Salon had already been active for three years. By the time he began his studies at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, the market for Chinese contemporary painting had already reached its high water mark. Before this, works by the instructors at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute—mainly born in the 1950s—and by the younger artists born in the late 1960s and early 1970s, whom they had taught and mentored, had already become significant parts of Chinese modern and contemporary painting history during the 1980s and 1990s. Around the year 2007, the term “new painting,”which critics had previously only used unconsciously, turned into a critical term intentionally employed by critics, used to describe the new phenomena constantly emerging within the medium. By 2015, when Zhang Zhaoying graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and returned from Belgium, a new batch of artists was emerging on the art market. The ambiguously defined term“new painting”became a hot topic in the art scene and was also quickly adopted by the market, used to denote newly emerging painters born in the 1980s and even the 90s.
Unlike earlier simple Surrealist painting from the '85 New Wave period, Zhang Zhaoying’s Surrealist compositions have developed into a complex and comprehensive exercise in iconographic history across time and space. This is particularly manifest in recent works such as Lifelong Beauty—The Temptation of Giorgio de Chirico. The starting point for this work was the
religious path of the ascetic monk Saint Anthony. The artist hoped to reveal the modern incarnations of medieval puritanical religious views by presenting this path beset by temptations. Along Saint Anthony's path, however, images from Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico are laid out like so many stage props: the melancholy street, figure models, and the Song of Love transforming the saintly markers of suffering into art historical aspirations. Evidently, the
artist’s aesthetic response to the temptations of Giorgio de Chirico is like that of Saint Anthony. De Chirico's compositions and narratives are themselves displays of melancholy and meditative exhortations. Through clearly visible image appropriation, rearrangement and alteration, Zhang Zhaoying illuminates spiritual issues of contemporary society, even the new temptations and desires people face in the 21st century. The artist says,“Society has begun to pay attention to depression, to individual existence, to meditations on the times. From ancient times to the present day. Though faith and religion are no longer the mainstream, temptation has never disappeared, and desire comes right behind it. This is the shadow of us all, like a tiny little theater of the desires of contemporary society.”
Due to unique historical context, Zhang Zhaoying's work inherits the evolutions of Chinese painting across various periods since the 1980s, touching on numerous traits of realist painting, Impressionism, Expressionism, Surrealism, and Pop, but at the same time, his painting has discarded unitary schemas in painting language, nimbly piecing together a unique methodology of his own, marked by free techniques and highly controlled execution. When we analyze his painting language, it is not difficult to grasp his artistic traits as long as we understand their historical context.