The art career of Zhang Xiaogang began with Jean-François Millet and Vincent van Gogh. While studying at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, a group of art enthusiasts including Zhang, Mao Xuhui and Ye Yongqing went on sketching trips to Nuohei village, rumored to resemble the French town of Barbizon. Even though he did not make it to Germany and Europe until a number of years later, the inner world of these artists was similar to that of the artists Lin Fengmian and Liu Haisu decades earlier; they too looked for the roots of their new art forms among the Barbizon painters and the impressionists who succeeded them. However, in the late 1970s, the influence of the Soviet Union was still very much alive:
Chinese art circles were heavily dominated by their Soviet counterparts. We would say we were ‘painting from life’ (xiesheng), but in fact we were attempting to create similar compositions, colors and even the emotions associated with the paintings of the Barbizon school and of the Russian Itinerant artists (Peredvizhniki). It goes without saying that ‘painting from life’ in this way was very difficult. Using a sense of grayness and elegant poetry to depict the red earth, blue sky and wildness to be found in the nature of Yunnan province is a bit farfetched. The same can be said of my later visits to Guishan: I was looking for traces of art works by great masters among the houses made of red earth and stones, the twigs and tree branches, and the narrow paths. Perhaps the village of Nuohei was the divine but neutral place that provided a foothold for my imagination and illusions. At the same time, I was little interested in either the local customs or the rustic and plain lifestyle, but I was invariably touched by the unique religious tranquility, by the woods rich in a sense of music, by the narrow paths and by the passing shepherds and sheep.
His early ideas reflect his distinct individuality: the purity of the soul that is sought by the young. At the same time, he was unwilling to limit this purity to depicting landscapes and the physical world. In Zhang Xiaogang’s reminiscence, we can observe a subtle psychological transition. Although Soviet art continued to influence these Chinese artists, they were interested in a relationship with nature, rather than with the socialist realism promulgated by the authorities. This interest was naturally extended to far-lying France, where Chinese artists found in painters such as Millet a divine spontaneity that originated in the inner self and was linked to the soul. As a result, by the 1980s, the influence of the Peredvizhniki had vanished into thin air. Admittedly, Zhang was influenced by the Peredvizhniki in his earliest work, but the impact of the latter was not as obvious as in the work of Cheng Conglin, who had been obviously influenced by the Russian artists. Zhang found the music of the natural world enticing, but under the blue sky and the shining sun, Nuohei with its red earth was completely different from the nature in Barbizon. Therefore, although the ‘gray timbre’ (hui diaozi) that had been initiated at the end of 1970s was extremely tempting for some, as demonstrated in the works of his classmate Cao Xiaohua, Zhang felt it had to be replaced by a form of expression that was closer to the natural environment in which they worked. Zhang admits that in early years he was influenced by Van Gogh, and he felt empathy with this troubled painter, the trembling of the soul being of paramount importance. The physical world is only one of many stimulating factors, while art itself is a natural entity brimful of life. Art has its own inherence and is not confined by the physical world. We learn of Zhang Xiaogang’s innate artistic vigilance from his early writings. Zhang loved every aspect of nature and felt passionate towards it, but from instinct, he gingerly dodged the philistine views that nature easily instills in those who lack sensitivity.
I finally saw the vast grassland. Here you can easily feel dwarfed and overwhelmed by the beautiful melodies and the profound meanings of each and every green wave. The world, pure and plentiful, uplifts your soul, widens it, expands it and raises it…Although sturdiness is one of characteristics of the Tibetans, what fascinates and enthralls me most is the meaning manifested in their faces. I do not wish to infiltrate their lives like many others do. Social customs are of no consequence. I can never forget that I am here as an artist. What are important are the eyes and the soul. By maintaining a distance, I find the artistic sense and a form that reflects my personal attributes.
Before graduating in 1982, Zhang maintained his longing for simple and free artistic expression. He had been through phases of excitement and madness, but at this time Zhang Xiaogang fled to nature and its inspirations. His graduating work titled Grassland Paintings (Caoyuan zuhua) was an examination of his inner self and feelings. Millet’s simplicity and Van Gogh’s skepticism regarding the psyche influenced him at the time. His other works, such as The Approaching Rainstorm (Baoyu jianglin) and Clouds in the Sky (Tianshang de yun), have since become documents of the expressionism of the early 1980s. These works differ from those of artists of the 1930s in that the longing for reality is intermingled with solace for the wounds of history. Artists such as Zhang instinctively knew what their inner world desired, but many artists were still obsessed with realism, even though a number were only interested in the subtle ‘gray timbre’ and the fabrications of the brush. Under these circumstances, Zhang Xiaogang rapidly acquired the artistic perception which an earlier generation of artists had in the 1920s and 1930s. The latter had been aware of where to focus attention when first employing a new mode of expression:
I had painted five oil paintings. Why did the last two feel better? Could it be because of their color or lines? It would seem that much more is needed to reflect their contrasting superiority. So I come to think of the complexities of art and of why works by great masters, like Millet and Van Gogh, could have such soul-shaking power? In addition to the basic elements required by painting, I believe that power also exists in the indescribable connotation expressed by the work, a spiritual power!
It is not the world that is discerned by the sensory organs, not a conceptual image that subconsciously flows, but the soul’s special reaction to nature, a landscape that is both natural and unnatural, nature in dreams. I think that that is what I want to accomplish in my inner world.
A realm of purity and authenticity and filled with wonderful dreams, all that is imbued with the known and unknown chaos, the awakening of puberty, the longing for sex and the reverie for the future. In the eyes of bystanders the artist may at such moments appear ridiculous, but he is at the same time at his most blissful. That is precisely what I wanted to express in my painting Clouds in the Sky.
These early texts are the product of an unsophisticated modernism. What is important is not his sensitivity to form, but rather the understanding of his inner needs. The language flows naturally. At this time Zhang Xiaogang’s graduation work did not attract wide attention, and his tutor seemed to favor the students who emulated Soviet art, using realism to generate a critique of historical issues. At that time, people were preoccupied with that kind of drama and had no greater acuity. That partly explains why Zhang Xiaogang did not stay on at the college to take up a teaching post after graduation.
The artist himself calls the period between 1982 and 1985 his ‘dark era’ (mogui shiqi). It was a time when an individual’s fate was decided by someone else. In his case, Zhang Xiaogang was allocated a job at the Kunming Opera Troupe after graduating from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. His job there was to paint the stage scenery, but he wasn’t a set designer. The period in which he could breathe the fresh air of nature had come to an end. Although he continued to go with friends to sketch at Guishan, he was confined to working as a set designer most of the time. Zhang felt that his inner being was stifled. His reading of Western books and his obsession with music aggravated the artist’s depression, anxiety, loneliness and sadness. During this period he felt that his aims in life had been extinguished, and he needed to rediscover what he was going to do next. However, what on earth was a non-professional art worker capable of doing in an opera troupe? Instinctively, Zhang continued to paint, feeling at a loose end. He began drinking copiously and lived an irregular life tormented by ill health. He was eventually admitted into hospital because of alcohol-induced stomach bleeding. In his white hospital bed, Zhang recalled memories of illnesses, fear and death, his sensitivity to an imaginary supernatural world, formed during his early years when his mother was ill. Everything seemed to be connected to the tragic aspects of life. After his hospitalization in 1984, Zhang’s sketches and oil paintings began to include images of the phantom world, while the more idyllic motifs of his earlier works disappeared. In his Phantom series (Youling xilie), Zhang expressed what he felt on the hospital bed and inside the ward, using surrealism. He wanted to portray his fear and anxiety about death. These paintings are imbedded with the characteristics of a diary of the soul.
At that time, the artist envisaged the possible entry of the soul into another world. The White Bed (Baise de chuang) depicts a place where spirits dwell, but it was no longer in a hospital and resembles the kind of hell delineated by El Greco. In this painting that used cold colors to depict the bed sheets and the environment, life is transformed into the soul of the imagination in hell, and the physical objects that were devoid of life have become invigorated. Zhang did not forget the lambs that he had seen on the Tibetan grasslands but the little lamb that lies on the bed in this painting is a personification of weakness and misery. In contrast with the arrogant and domineering bed sheet, it is hinted that life is so pitiable and delicate that life, or its image, has come to symbolize death.
Paintings such as The White Bed and Moving to the Edge: Colorful Phantoms, Series # 3 (Xiang bianyuan yidong: Chongman secai de youling xilie zhi san) are art works that break away from what was called Scar Art. They deal with the emotional presentiment of death and are the product of abstract thinking about life and existence. Of course, anyone could use terms like ‘expressionism’ to describe these works. What is important is that, in his wariness regarding the materialistic world, the artist began to make a complete turnaround in his epistemology and had begun to reconsider issues such as life, existence, death and religion. These were the same issues with which his artist friends were grappling. Twisted images and somber compositions became a visual record of Zhang Xiaogang’s cognitive shift. Artists of the 1980s acknowledged the infiltration of philosophy into art and they were enthusiastic about deciphering the existence of reality and the soul using terms drawn from Western philosophers, using them to analyze past ideals in which they no longer had faith. They no longer tried to spend time understanding what the ancient Chinese had left behind. The West with its allurements had the power to draw them in, and in this context, the warning of Jean-Paul Sartre is fascinating:
In 1984 I started working on the Phantom (Youling) series. At that time, my inspiration primarily came from the feelings I had at the hospital. When I lay on the white bed, on the white bed sheet, I saw many ghost-like patients comforting each other in the crammed hospital wards. When night fell, groaning sounds rose above the hospital and some of the withering bodies around me had wasted away or were drifting on the brink of death. These deeply stirred my feelings. They were so close to my life experiences at that time and to my own lonely miserable soul. That was why I painted a series of sketches entitled Phantoms between White and Black: A Hospital Diary (Heibai zhi jian de youling: Zhuyuan riji). After I was discharged from hospital, I continued to paint a series of oil paintings entitled The Colorful Phantoms (Chongman secai de youling), expressing the fear and solemn feelings the soul experiences while lingering on the threshold between life and death; it was also a lamentation over the condition of life in which some of us found ourselves. My artistic language was influenced by El Greco and Salvador Dali; my thinking on the other hand leaned directly towards Western absurdist writers and existentialist theories. In my works I stressed the sense of misery and of suffering attributable to some kind of absurdity and convulsion.
The restoration to life gave Zhang reason to rejoice in rationality. At the same time, when rationally learns of the breadth of life, a sense of humor is restored as a form of transcendental cognition. On recovering Zhang Xiaogang recorded an interesting dialogue between the devil and life in his diary:
‘Please play the violin and sing a magnificent ode to death’, said the devil.
‘Behold the rising sun at daybreak. No, the thing that I am going to glorify in song is the great existence between life and death’, said the phantom.
The insignificance of the individual enabled the artist to seek support, but was there anyone willing care for a poor artist? Like the earlier modernists in Europe who opposed the forces of academism, and who formed societies or associations by grouping together, young Chinese artists of the 1980s had to rely on themselves to safeguard and develop their beliefs. Although Chinese society in the 1980s potentially had plenty of freedom and possibilities, it was up to young artists to utilize this space and of course they needed to turn to other young people with similar needs.
In 1985, Zhang Xiaogang, Mao Xuhui and several other artists teamed up and organized an exhibition entitled New Figurative Images. When Zhang Long, a friend from Kunming studying at the Art Department of East China Normal University in Shanghai, saw paintings by Mao Xuhui, Pan Dehai and Zhang during a holiday in Kunming, he was ‘deeply moved and thought that the paintings in Shanghai were weak, a bit too sweet and lifeless’. Zhang’s friend, Mao Xuhui has left an interesting account of this in ‘The New Figurative Images Exhibition and the Southwestern Art Research Group’ (Ji Xinjuxiang huazhan he huajia Yiji Xinan Yishu Yanjiu Qunti):
[Zhang Long] proposed that we stage a show in Shanghai. He could help us arrange the exhibition venue, but we had to share the expenses. So our most urgent task was earning some money. To that end, we got involved with interior decoration companies and engaged in remodeling houses and drawing up plans. We put in a great deal of effort for a time, but made little money. Then a telegram came from Shanghai. As the exhibition venue had been arranged, we had to act quickly. We had to borrow money. Pan (Dehai) had 600 yuan, Mao (Xuhui) borrowed 300, and Zhang (Xiaogang) borrowed 200. The three of us packed our paintings into eight boxes and made two trips on a tricycle to the railroad station to arrange their shipment. Due to the urgency, we used an express service, which cost us 400 yuan. Both Pan and Mao asked their bosses for leave of absence before they went to Shanghai for the exhibition. Zhang was stranded in Kunming on business. We had to do everything related to the show in person, such as painting the advertising, printing invitations, advertising in newspapers, moving and hanging the paintings, and decorating the venue. At night we slept in the student dorm or classrooms at the Department of Fine Arts in the East China Normal University, and we had to evade the questions of campus guards on a daily basis. The happy time in the evenings was spent in the university beverage lounge with jazz and coffee. Apart from Zhang Long, Hou Wenyi from Shanghai also took part in the show. After graduating from Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in 1982, she was assigned to work in a small town in Hunan province. She stayed there for a few years before she found a job in the Shanghai Institute of Culture and History. She was penniless too... She proposed that our show be named New Figurative Images and we approved it on instinct... Before the opening of the show, Hou Wenyi got another artist, Xu Kan, a sculptor who graduated from Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, to also join the show. He didn’t contribute much monetarily to the show. We only asked him to buy some paints. In June 1985, the exhibition opened at the Jing’an District Cultural Center in Shanghai. A girl presented us with a basket of fresh flowers. The rent for the venue was 30 yuan a day, and we were not to share in the take from admissions. On the first day, there were many visitors, old and young, including personages from Shanghai art circles, such as the late Guan Liang and Mr. Ada. The exhibition hall, with 120 works on show, was hot with such a big crowd. Some of the metal sculptures had to be displayed in the passageway. We were all shaking hands with visitors and explaining our works to them. Everyone felt that the exhibition was exciting.
This was collectivism in action, and the attention that society paid to the artists reinforced their self-confidence. Between 1985 and 1986, exhibitions organized through the collective effort of artists became a commonplace phenomenon, which was to be known later as the ’85 Art Movement or the ’85 Art Ideological Trend. The name matters little. What was important is that this was a period that represented the continuation of our appreciation and understanding of the West, renewed following the lull that extended from the 1930s during the War against Japanese Aggression to 1976. From the political perspective, it was a symbol of ideological emancipation in which Western thought and ideologies (including science, politics, philosophy and art) were considered to be important comparative media or reference sources through which China and her people could embark once more on the road of development. Holding joint exhibitions was now endorsed as legitimate and given space to develop. The long-standing national ideology with which the people were familiar continued unabated in its original form, but everyone now had the freedom to reinterpret everything, as long as the interpretation in his or her mind was construed to be constructive.
In Shanghai and Nanjing, the artists from Kunming received help from their friends, the poet Zhang Zhen and the artist, Ding Fang, and these young expressionists soon came to the attention of the art critics Gao Minglu and Li Xianting. They began organizing more groups to conduct long-term collective art activities. In a short time, Zhang became one of the main activists and organizers in the Southwestern Art Research Group. This was in 1986, when Zhang had just been admitted into the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts and became a ‘professional’ artist, by virtue of being an art teacher.
Zhang Xiaogang’s ‘dark era’ soon came to an end in the midst of hectic art activities and communal celebration, and his ‘period on the other shore’ (bi’an shiqi, 1986-1989), to quote Hegel’s categorization of Kant, began. Critics and some artists are curious as to why during the ’85 Art Movement, questions of art invariably become questions of philosophy, and people spoke of ‘renovating concepts’ (guannian gengxin) when describing the artists’ interest in philosophical issues. Indeed, the contemplation of philosophical questions was a major landmark in the change of direction in their epistemology. When the effectiveness of old ideologies was waning, how on earth do you view society and the people that are in it, when they too are undergoing transition? Did the modernists in the West ponder philosophical questions? What ideals were needed in the present era? In the wake of toppling old idols, what spiritual support was required for the future? People started discovering that the real dilemma did not stem from the shackles of the flesh, but rather the choices one had to make in the vast, unlimited spiritual realm. What was the soul? What should art be like today? Chinese artists of the 1980s were familiar with the famous words of Paul Gauguin: ‘Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?’ The letters that form an archive of artists in the late 1980s document the new concerns:
What is the problem with this year? The world outside is so barren and lonely, while our internal world is equally ‘ulcerous’: This is horrible. Xu Hui, honestly, I think that the condition I am in will be fatal. Should I be brave about the elevation of this tragedy? Or should I sentimentally lick my wounds, and just let the blood flow for no reason?…
You mentioned in your letter ‘what should or should not be done. The world itself is increasingly without a clear reason or purpose urging us to go on’. I felt that that hits on the void we now find ourselves in. Yes, as time passes, we come to appreciate the great power of absurdity. In contrast, our earlier dreams and passions were pale and weak, even ridiculous. But I feel that the history of the world is driven by maniacs, but they might just change in some ridiculously meaningless instant into reasonable ‘children’. Because these maniacs have been engaged in the promotion of the ridiculous, many matters, which were previously insignificant, might take on new meanings and become ‘fundamental things’. (Letter from Zhang Xiaogang to Mao Xuhui of 31 May 1987)
I have read your letter and feel the same way as I did with the previous letter. You ought to relax a lot more. The burden you are shouldering is too heavy for you. This is the terrible truth, but it is the tragedy of people like us. I sometimes really want to be simpler, keep my goals focused, go for it and build my own life, without thinking about the fate of Martin Eden. If he hadn’t spent the first half of his life in a kind of lunacy, he wouldn’t have been caught up in illusion and emptiness or rather he wouldn’t have struggled for a higher illusion. In this process, might some chance event reflect the real meaning of things? (From a letter to Mao Xuhui of 20 June 1987)
I was delighted by your recent wonderful paintings. I applaud and understand your knowledge of medieval art. Over the past six months, I seem to have been looking back and getting rid of most of the so-called modern things. I think this is necessary. As a matter of fact, we’re not attempting to ‘restore ancient practices’. We’re following our inner desires and looking for some simple but sacred ‘healthy spirit’, based on a modern understanding of the term. But this spirit is becoming extremely rare, or has been used as a ladder in the social status game… (From a letter to Mao Xuhui on 10 November 1987)
…Our lives are built on art, which we regard as the highest and most worthwhile value system. In the depths of our hearts, there is something solemn, something that is responsibility personified…Were it not for this intensity, we could not have remained so tolerant until now, with tears in our eyes, during our most difficult time and when the whole of society has locked their gates to us. (From a letter to Mao Xuhui of 28 March 1988)
It was fortunate that there have been great men like Plato and Hegel. They enabled the independence of the spirit from the body, making this independent symbol of life endure to the present. Otherwise, human history would have been unthinkable. I often find my thoughts in a muddled paradox. The only thing I can do is to stay involved in activities that relate to the soul and spirit, while watching endless martial arts films. What else can I do? You were right in saying that everything we encounter contributes to the way we deal with art, our distant and cherished totem.
Yet, reality is often perverse. Loneliness has almost become something at your disposal, which you can deal with at will and yet it will, like our hair, grow naturally. Is this been predestined? In the same way that sheep can never sing the call of the nightingale? And are we like sheep?…（From a letter to Mao Xuhui of 2 July 1988）
Thanks for sending me Notes on Art by Jean Paul Sartre. It seems like this book was written exclusively for us. I often come to that conclusion when reading books about human existence. (From a letter to Mao Xuhui of 3 October 1990)
Zhang Xiaogang’s uninterrupted correspondence records his views on art at that time. What is interesting is that unlike Van Gogh, who wrote a comprehensive description of Albrecht Dürer’s colors, the young Chinese artists rarely discussed technical matters. In a letter to Mao dated 18 December, 1989, Zhang provides an insight into this:
In our present condition, the most important things are not external problems such as the technique and style. Without spirit, earlier artists would not have had forms. Without soul, there would have not been style or integrity. Without spirit, all art works are void.
The motifs of the first two phases of Zhang’s artistic life, the ‘dark era’ and ‘the period on the opposite shore’, are not essentially different in nature. But in the second period Zhang had begun a rational review of issues related to life and death. The artist tried to experiment with paper, by spraying colors on paper and then cutting the outlines of the images with a knife. Usually, he burnished part of the work to make it look fragile. Belonging to this category is Lost Dreams (Yimengji), a collection of about 40 paintings done between 1986 and 1988, which was an experimental series of works imbued with lyricism. The painter simultaneously used oil paints and pieces of cloth in the paintings. Sometimes he also used simple oil painting to complete his dream world, an example being the 1988 work Eternal Love (Shengshengxixi zhi ai). Zhang continuously pursued his disorderly reading of Western philosophy and literature, and he listened to what he regarded as tragic and lofty music. At the same time he was obsessed with Pink Floyd’s The Wall. In fact, all his readings and appreciation of music resulted in weird prose and poems. He did not want the poems to become ordinary epics, but symbols and metaphors. In his Vast Sea (Haohan de hai) of 1989, we can see omnipresent skulls. What do the two skulls on the opened page of the Holy Bible tell us? The red skull, rather than representing Jesus Christ, seems to represent the artist himself. What is different between these works and his earlier works treating death is that the images in these works do not lose their living coldness because of the lack of physical integrity: the people floating in the water are contemplating; the skulls wandering in the sky are also related to issues of life; the hand against the leaf of the tree seems seductive. In The Last Supper (Zuihou de wancan), the Jesus-shaped skulls and the floating broken limbs and skulls all combine to create doubts about life in a richly poetic way. The goat’s skull on the platter and the ace of spades at a corner of the table suggest a mystery: What on earth are we to think about the mysterious space between the man and woman? In fact, in many works until 1991, including Hand-written Note (Shouji), his motifs never stray from the theme of life and death; this kind of motif was derived from the artist’s personal experience and was influenced or suggested by Western philosophy. In 1989, the artist again felt the bloodiness and stimulus of reality, and it seemed to him again that there was an inescapable basis in reality for his themes of life and death. In a letter to Mao Xuhui dated 18 December 1989, Zhang wrote:
The 1990s will soon be here. Once we are in the new decade, we will have to admit that we as solitary individuals are limited…Recently, I felt that I had returned to the past, and was listening to the music of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. El Greco was beside me, as were Jean-Paul Sartre and Miguel de Unamono.
In the view of conceptual artists, this artistic sensibility and state of mind that suggest ‘lyrical prose’ reveal a lack of epistemology and linguistics, and are a disguised form of sentimentalized writing:
I went to the post office yesterday to get the album German Requiem, which you had sent me. I have listened to it twice. As I am writing to you now, I am listening to it for a third time.
If Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis was composed for heroes in a tragic situation, then Brahms’ German Requiem was composed for heroes in an idealistic state. The vast musical movement demonstrates the tremendous power it exhibits when the soul becomes sublime. A dictionary says that this piece of music was created by the artist for his deceased mother, but I believe that an artist transcends his identity, such as his name and place of birth, when he is creating a work of art. He can then create something moving which is attributable to his ability to elevate what he sees in everyday life to some kind of artistic form. So I would suggest that the relationship between the artist and his work is a relationship between artistic form and the artistic work. It is the personality that has the power to innovate, a personality that is not simply held to a particular existence.
By the end of the 1980s, important artists represented in the ’85 Art Movement such as Wang Guangyi, Wu Shanzhuan, Huang Yongping and Zhang Peili were no longer discussing sentimentalized issues. The Southwestern artists defended themselves by asking if issues related to existentialism had really been resolved. In the same letter, we also notice a subtle change: Zhang had realized the importance of rationality in epistemology. ‘Maybe we can say that art should signify some rational control over things?’ (From a letter to Mao Xuhui dated 4 December 1990)
During the China Avant-Garde Art Exhibition held in 1989, Wang Guangyi challenged expressionist artists with his remark about ‘cleaning away humanistic enthusiasm’ (qingli renwen reqing). In 1988, art circles began discussing the ‘ontology of language’ (yuyan benti). The contrast between the following schools was not simply limited to form: the Northern Art School proposed ‘rational painting’ (lixing huihua); the New Space School (Chinese: Yishu Tuanti) proposed ‘indifference’ (lengmo); and the difference between the expressionists and the abstractionist painters was also not only formal. Artists were also divided about the future of art. The Southwestern artists believed that artistic expression, from Scar Art onwards, had strayed from artistic truth. At this time, the rise of academic realism, as represented by Jin Shangyi, Yang Feiyun and Wang Yidong, was intermingled with many of the issues which modernist artists were debating and this resulted in a great deal of confusion. Nonetheless, the sentiments of the Southwestern artists were endorsed by art critic Li Xianting’s theory of the ‘grand soul’ (da linghun). However, the ‘grand soul’ concept was no longer voiced after June 1989, because it too readily used art as a weapon to assault political reality. After June 1989, all artists were in a state of bewilderment and confusion, hoping for any possibility of change. Speculation continued, but Zhang himself had no new conclusions to draw. The ‘return to reality’ (hui dao xianshi) that artists talked about was only a way of linking social and artistic realities after so many years of discussing the question:
What an insane and nihilistic era we find ourselves in! Look at our impatient fellow artists. There is something unspeakable, but I feel that our muteness does not mean that we are timid. For me, it is more a kind of solitude. I feel that we and ‘those who can only destroy’ (pohuaizhe) inhabit two separate worlds and have nothing to do with each other. We have nothing to do with the nihilistic power holders, and nothing to do with the mannerism that attempts to estrange art from the human spirit in order to gratify the senses and be owned by wealthy patrons only. Perhaps the spiritual idealism represented by Van Gogh has forever gone. Maybe this era is awaiting a new type of Van Gogh. For me, life without belief is like the pathetic existence of a maggot. In a world without ‘religion’ we live as whores. In my opinion, art has not succeeded in decorating people’s lives. Art is not a luxurious overcoat. As many people have proved, art is only a handicraft, something that you can exchange for your daily necessities. Of course, this includes art in the form of illustrations. On the contrary, art itself is a kind of life. ‘It represents a belief’. What is strange is that after my trip to Beijing, I have been reviewing the state of mind in which we originally found ourselves…(From a letter to Mao Xuhui dated 17 March 1989)
In a letter to Mao in April 1990, Zhang expressed his opinion on Li Xianting’s formulation of the ‘grand soul’. His understanding was that ‘it was the kind of holistic strong sentiment and big consciousness that we find in the works of artists such as Beethoven, Sibelius, El Greco and Francis Bacon’. In the same letter, he said that he preferred neo-expressionism. In the quagmire of mannerism in the 1970s, artists took up the most basic and ardent human features to point to problems then associated with contemporary life, returning art as a new concept to the human domain in which art initially was an integral part. Zhang was adamant in this firm belief:
I believe that the misery and confusion we have experienced and are experiencing are not confined to us, and they are not a haphazard product. (From a letter to Mao Xuhui dated 7 November 1990)
With regard to the work of other artists, he wrote:
We can never view art as an isolated object like those who are organizing a ‘linguistic revolution’; such an attitude will bring loneliness and misery. We are not creating horrific monsters and phantoms to invade cities and villages. Rather, monsters and phantoms are driving our bodies and souls towards an unknown world. (From letter to Mao Xuhui dated 7 November 1990)
Those who were engaged in ‘the linguistic revolution’ (yuyan geming) might have been tempted to ask: ‘What monsters? What phantoms? What do you mean by loneliness and misery?’ Nobody responded to such questions. Between 1990 and the beginning of 1992, a new generation of painters in the north and Cynical Realist paintings emerged and began to exert influence. Nobody continued to go further along the route of essentialism. In 1992, Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour of China once again changed the political atmosphere that had been created in June 1989. In the coastal regions of China at least, people discovered that in the market economy mechanisms they could rediscover their own path of development. At that time, artists in Wuhan, in central China, were creating new Pop Art. They were preparing with enthusiasm for the Guangzhou Biennale. At the beginning of that year, Zhang Xiaogang went to Germany and saw for himself art works by the great masters he so worshipped. When he was bidding his friends farewell, he felt a sudden emotion that a Westerner might find hard to comprehend:
Look. I am going to the hometowns of Nietzsche and Heidegger, Hermann Hesse and Anselm Kiefer. But I cannot help feeling melancholy. They are the glorious names that have motivated me and I considered them to be my soul mates. I was touched beyond description by their ideas and life experiences. I have no idea when I came to fully appreciate the fact that I am Chinese. With sorrow, I have pulled my soul and heart back from a bottomless abyss, and now I have to carry new baggage for my engagement with these glorious names in some new dialogue. What will happen as a result of this? Nobody can know. (From the letter to Mao Xuhui dated June 1992)
Zhang’s visit to Germany only lasted three months. Before heading back to China, he wrote a letter in August to artist Ye Yongqing and art critic Wang Lin. In it, he admitted that when face to face with Western art, he was not as moved as he had thought he would be:
I have seen many an exhibition at Documenta Kassel and at Contemporary Chinese Art. Truth be told, the first impression was not that exciting. Like Westerners, we have to see things in their cultural contexts, so if you are a bit far away, you cannot sufficiently appreciate many of the art works.
The artist made a comparison between capitalist Germany and socialist China, and concluded that, in comparison, China has seen vast and rapid changes in the past ten years, like an upstart. As Deng Xiaoping had hoped, some of us became rich first. He noticed that in the West the once antagonistic and rebellious avant-garde art had proliferated and was omnipresent. He felt that the deepest impression he had after visiting the West was that there was too much art, too many art forms, and they were too liberated and consequently not so noticeable. The meaning and value of art itself had been tampered with and dismembered. That was a vivid contrast to what was happening in China.
When he was discussing his disappointment at the absence of great artists, such as Beuys and Kiefer, and their works at Documenta Kassel, he also described the luxurious and aristocratic atmosphere that now pervaded contemporary Western art, noting the visits to exhibitions of international VIPs and royalty. This was somewhat different from the perception Chinese artists had of the state of Western art. At the same time, the work K18 by the group of Chinese avant-garde artists represented at the exhibition, Lü Shengzhong, Wang Luyan, Ni Haifeng and Li Shan, had an ‘underground character that seemed like a decorative curlicue (peichen) at a capitalist event’. (From the letter to Wang Lin and Ye Yongqing dated 24 August 1992)
In October that year, Zhang returned to China. Now he had a new ideological background and personal experiences to tap into. He had a new assured understanding of the once mysterious Western art and of the vitality generated by domestic commercial trends. Earlier, when troubled by depression and a pure sense of inner conflict he had completed works titled The Black Trilogy (Heise sanbuqu) and the series Hand-written Note (Shouji xilie), which did not fit well with the Chinese domestic scene at the time. Is the gloomy channel between life and death really only a bigoted illusion or some psychological need that is hard to shake off? What on earth is the relationship between reality and illusion? For modernists, the soul is of absolute importance, but can the soul itself become an object of renewed examination? The artist himself had employed the term ‘spiritual realism’ (xinling xianshi zhuyi) but by the latter half of 1992, he started using another simpler term, ‘contemporary art’ (dangdai yishu). He had found the exploration of essentialism to be a bottomless abyss, despite the fact that he retained his obsession with sentimentalism and moroseness. He then wrote: ‘The approach to entering a contemporary artistic state is characterized by distinct individualistic art styles (the right approach to the language of art); at the same time, one must also transcend the mannerism complex (new images, new style, new manner, and other ‘imagistic principles’). He believes that is the extremely difficult problem facing the contemporary artist community. Was it created by the stimulus of rampant Pop Art, which swept the art scene at the 1992 Guangzhou Art Biennale, or was it the influence of Cynical Realism that resulted in Zhang’s pressing need to examine the linguistic problem? As a sensitive artist, Zhang was well aware of the importance of changing the artistic language, and he knew that up to that point modernist artists had not been very successful in this, because they failed to be acknowledged by the art establishment or to be fully appreciated by society. They were still orphans living in the still of the night, whose days were of little value. At the beginning of 1992, Zhang told Mao Xuhui: ‘By now, although we feel that some progress has been made, we are getting bald and are still not able to play the game. But not for a single moment do I not feel that we are still a group of underground artists, like some gang of drug smugglers. There is nothing that makes me sadder or more disappointed than realizing that we are still a marginalized group’. However, when in the West, Zhang Xiaogang felt that he had no choice but to return to China, but that was a big challenge, because his own country had not really accepted him. At that time, Zhang still spoke about ‘being lonely and helpless’, ‘the breakup of personal life’, ‘fate’, ‘tragedy’ ‘reminiscence’, and ‘the depths of the soul’, but by 1993, he had begun to style himself a ‘spiritual loafer’ (jingshen de liulanghan). In March of that year, his painting series Hand-written Notes was categorized as belonging to ‘the spirit of the traumatized romantic’ (chuangshang de langman jingshen) in the Post-89 China New Art Exhibition. However, Political Pop (as represented by Wang Guangyi, Yu Youhan, Li Shan and others) and the ‘sense of ennui and of the ruffian style’ (wuliaogan yu popifeng) (as represented by Fang Lijun, Liu Wei, Wang Jinsong and Liu Xiaodong) became the focal points for the public.
Zhang was indifferent to those works that were clear in their drawing technique and specific in concept. He may well have been strongly stimulated and felt the inner need for change. He gingerly analyzed everything with which he was familiar:
What is it that we can command? What really belongs to us that we can unequivocally claim to be ours? What things (fate, life, history, culture) can we change in accordance with our will? Fate is fickle like a game of poker and it may change continually. When we observe those ‘resolute martyrs’, we feel that life today is pale and even devoid of meaning. Look at those actors who rush into the spotlight. Do we not feel bored and confused by the obsession and greed these ‘public figures’ display? The human soul can wander everywhere, but it will never find home and shelter. What are we in control of? We are only sober to the fact that we are sensible, rational insignificant creatures living in concrete reality. (From a letter to Mao Xuhui dated 1 June 1993)
After a period of extended meditation and experiments, Zhang now seemed to be moving away from his obsession with the bottomless abyss. In that year, he painted several works that became a crucial turning point in his career: Yellow Portrait (Huangse xiaoxiang), Red Portrait (Hongse xiaoxiang), Bloodline: Mother and Son (Xueyuan: Mu zi), and Red Baby (Hongse nanying). Yellow Portrait and Red Portrait feature his friends Ye Yongqing and Mao Xuhui. We may regard these two paintings as an experimental attempt to get rid of excessive expressionist language. Bloodline: Mother and Son and Red Baby, as well as these two works belong in content to the same group treating the themes of bloodlines, life, growing pains and imaginable death. Zhang retained the original core and motifs of his art, and even his earlier surrealistic psychological characteristics, the accidental light and the combination of objects devoid of natural logic. The artist steadfastly maintained what he considered to be the most important aspect of art and, at the same time, opened up the linguistic expression of his art. By the end of 1993, Zhang was moving rapidly along what was regarded as a typical iconological path, and with the appearance of the piece Bloodline: A Big Family (Xueyuan: Da jiating) in 1994, the ‘shackles’ of expressionism had been completely removed. How does the artist explain the change in the artist’s artistic language?
The elements that constitute my recent art works stem from some old photos from a private collection, and from charcoal drawings that were once seen everywhere in the streets, in addition to what history and reality have instilled in our complicated minds. I cannot say clearly which string in the depths of my soul was pulled by these carefully restored old photos. They made me think and I loved them. Maybe because at that time these old pictures not only provided me the joy of reminiscence but they also presented a simple, direct but somewhat illusory visual language, which validated my intention to discard attempts at enigmatic mannerism and bloated romanticism. At the same time, such iconological languages like old pictures and charcoal sketches embody things that I am familiar with but indifferent to, among which are the aesthetic requirements that ordinary Chinese have long been accustomed to, such as the emphasis on collectivism at the expense of individualism, modesty, neutrality and a lyrical aesthetic. (From Personal Account, 1995)
Was it the passage of time that had inspired the artist to rearrange these figurative resources? Zhang’s family had been ‘revolutionary cadres’, a class of people familiar to people born in the 1950s. Such families had tried to keep their earlier photographs taken during the revolutionary period and the years of national reconstruction. They were very different from the even earlier photos in which people were photographed in long gowns and mandarin jackets. On the contrary, old pictures taken between the 1940s and early 1970s were directly linked, emotionally and historically, to living Chinese people, both parents and children, and they spanned several important historical periods. The fate of his mother was an early psychological shadow for Zhang Xiaogang. When these old images again emerged and showed how time had elapsed, the artist was filled with an intangible sorrow and melancholy. How on earth did life come about and how do we grow? What connections are there between our past and present that we must fully understand and respect? Individual experiences of life change over decades, but the understanding of time and its passage may be uniform. The stories may have been forgotten and many details may cease to be important, but those images that awaken the memory remain touching. In 1993, the artist also painted the work titled Tian’anmen (Tian’anmen Gate) in the same small room in Zouma Street in Chengdu. With a worn out brush, he evoked a deserted time, but retained ‘the expressionist shackles’ that we can see in earlier portraits and other paintings. With his understanding and analysis of images, the artist finally discovered that his meditation on life and death and on history and reality could be achieved without any expressionist approach. In other words, by suppressing inner feelings and sentiments, he could explore the soul in a more rational way. This was an ancient mode of expression but Zhang left room for the state of mind which could be described as ‘modern’ but not ‘contemporary’. He believed that changes in working styles and in ways of expression are significant characteristics of ‘contemporary’ life, and that the history of a spiritual soul cannot end because of a change in name. He is not willing to participate in contemporary operas that are filled with comedy, because he knows that in a consumer-led era, in an era in which sorrow can be packaged and sold like a commodity, people are finding it increasingly difficult to evade ‘self-deception’. He wrote:
People consume gratitude and sorrow from everywhere, and draw on the excitement of different cultures, the arrogance of wealthy celebrities, the humility of insignificant people, the intense joy of winners and the awkward self-mockery of the defeated. They consume the cruel games of war, the many weird varieties of sexual intercourse, the torments of every variety of thwarted love, every variety of paranormal function, Maradona’s addiction to cocaine, the real reason for Marilyn Monroe’s suicide, the bra cup measurements of Amy Yip and Veronica Yip, the number of Madonna’s sex partners, the skin of Michael Jackson, the foot burns my friend sustained, a queer-flavored dish that a small restaurant came up with, someone losing hair at an increasingly rapid rate, and the rest. (From a letter to Mao Xuhui dated 1 June 1992)
Even though the artist discovered Cynical Realism, Political Pop and the subsequent Gaudy Art, he decided against involvement with any of them. Although he was still lonely, many critics were skeptical of the ambiguous, plain characters in his works. They suspected that the artist had decided to work as though preparing pictures for a calendar and had become ensnared by philistinism; in the process he had lost his sharp edge and his willingness to engage in the battle between ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ art.
Lonely people are actually incapable of genuinely changing themselves. What he yearned for was warmth and concern, but he believed that the price of being acknowledged was that he could not rebel. He remembered the days and nights spent with his friends on the banks of the ‘Seine River’ in Kunming, when they discussed ideals and disillusionment, love and death, in the darkness or under the lamplight. He was well aware that the meaning of life in contemporary society could not be traded for compromises. He would rather live in solitude than act on stage as a clown. He abhors superficiality and formalities, and even detests the word deconstruction, preferring to stress the mentality and spirituality of Joseph Beuys. In 1992, when Zhang saw with his own eyes works by ReneMagritte, whose name he remembered from an old book titled History of the Art of the Western World, he was deeply touched:
His plain, simple and meaningful artistic language reorganizes the different settings and objects of reality into an imaginary space, creating a specific mental dislocation and illusion. Through his paintings, one enters a dreamlike spiritual realm, in which one finds multiple meanings and spiritual perspectives. This shocked me, and made me worship the artist. (From ‘My Soul Mate: Magritte’, Art World, Edition 132, Shanghai Art and Literature Publishing House, 2001)
Having rediscovered his soul mate, he better realized that in looking for his own art path, he would at different phases have different partners. In the art works of those masters he found his confidants. Discussing his own spiritual world, Zhang explained that ‘as an artist develops, he has to bid farewell to some of those masters he once was obsessed with, and make acquaintance with other predecessors with whom he can interact’. Zhang thus simplified the complex contents of his earlier surrealism. China’s peculiar historical background and his own unique experiences then led him in another direction, one triggered by the old photographs. ‘Listen, this isn’t calendar art, but what I have learned from Magritte and De Chirico, which is to relive our own long and solemn history at a distance, and to confront the capricious reality in which we live’.
The way in which the photographs were decorated also became an inspiration for new ways of expression. The concept of ‘decoration’ (xiushi) is fraught with uncertainties, which makes the paintings in the series titled Family and Bloodline hypothetical images that the artist has created. By the 1980s, sensitive artists were agreed that photographs are not the equivalents of real objects. Not only does the camera lens change the view, the level surface itself determines the independence and irreplaceable nature of the images. So were these time-worn images only emblems of ‘real likenesses’? Indeed, people born after the 1950s are very familiar with the kind of photos that Zhang was referencing. The orderly and prescribed poses, as well as the standardized facial expressions, were considered symbols of a past era. The complex aspect of the work was that the artist did not try to re-create the reappearance of a bona fide ‘big family’. The work was far from being the simple recollection of the artist relying on the help of photographs. He started reinterpreting the impressions the photos made on him. He presupposed the meaning suggested to him by experience and knowledge, and then re-interpreted the subdued level features on the faces of the people photographed after the pictures had been processed by the original photographer. The artist mentioned the various kinds of blood relationships that relate to kinship, society and culture. But was the projection of this rational knowledge the main reason for the bloodline motifs? Would the emotional complex that could not be unraveled become a clue to the little red lines?
Before the appearance of the mature Family series of works, Zhang experimented in the ‘simulation’ (moni) of objects that he saw with his eyes. Of course, simulation is not a term used to describe the reemergence of reality, but rather, the direct source of inspiration, the physical reality that is visually captured by the artist. When constantly reminded by such elements as photographs to think about other matters, Zhang Xiaogang was more obviously engaged in the process of ‘constructing’ mentality. Photographs are not history itself, but a reminder of history. This reasoning resembles Plato’s theory in which images themselves are not facts. As a result, Zhang acquiesced in this mental state which is difficult to articulate in words. He decided to indulge in the production of hypothetical images: the application of light, the highlighting, the obtruded refraction of the light, the thin red thread, the facial arrangement that is completely different from the photographs, and the sudden appearance of other colors amidst the wide area of grey. A hypothetical image instilled with ideological coloring had been created. However, could a Chinese born in the 1980s or a Westerner understand the image that the artist had intended to convey? It is very difficult to say. As with Fang Lijun’s work, the images do not have a systematically adjusted object, but rather an accidental raison d’être, a subtle meditation on Magritte, and details supplemented to form a complete hypothetical image. This is not the opposite of reality or opposed to reality, nor is it a simulation of illusions. To different artists, the hypothetical image is one of their ways to break away from all restraints. Zhang’s hypothetical images are so rich in possibilities that descriptions such as ‘umbilical cords of our time’ have been applied to the works. Is there anything more real than this kind of illusion? At the 22nd São Paulo Biennial in 1994, Zhang exhibited his spiritual Bloodline series and the Family series to acclaim, and he has received popular acknowledgement in many other exhibitions since then. A morose and sentimental spiritual history has been deduced from these images. People understand the feelings of the artist and want him to continue to recount more complicated relationships and hidden emotions. Gradually, others, and not the artist himself, have consolidated an aesthetic mode for this spiritual history. Zhang later extended the scope of memory and he took an interest in time-related objects: old light bulbs, old telephone sets, empty wine bottles, spent candles knocked over ink bottles…
In 2006, Zhang began an experiment in exploring visual resources in the history of socialism. Now, he is no longer interested in existential questions regarding life and death, nor the relentless pursuit of essentialism. With inner solace, as well as energy, he can plumb these historical cultural resources, when his memory is again assailed by images of history, whether they are photographs of the way we once lived or labored simply in the days of socialist reconstruction, because these images are no longer clear, just like our memory, which is also limited. The artist says that we ought to observe history and reality at a distance. At the same time, we build an imaginary kingdom in which our soul can temporarily seek solace. To be able to read and appreciate Zhang’s work still requires knowledge of history. The artist chose photographs produced with crude equipment, scenes from the socialist period of China’s history. What is different is that in these scenes, the turmoil and discordant sounds have disappeared, rendering the scenes differently to memory. In his art works, socialism appears bleak and crowded places are devoid of revolutionary spirit. Zhang has utterly and completely transformed our recollection of socialism. He wants to say: ‘In fact, what is seen in the paintings is only a legacy of history and the once buoyant scenes of socialist construction in full-swing are only a hazy memory. When we reassess history, why are we unable to read the past from the perspective of today? Why can we not reinterpret what has been presumed to be established truth, the legitimacy of which is rather doubtful?’ The artist retains typical symbols of history—red flags, loudspeakers and other historical props. By re-portraying historical scenes, he hopes to trigger people’s recall and reinterpretation of history and historical issues. The artist is not trying to provide rational political answers but is simply trying to retain his long years of contemplation about life, history and the spirituality of human beings in his own work, in order to provide a source of solace in his inner world. In the illusory kingdom of hypothetical images that the artist has created, we can still make sense of the history of a lonely soul, and its melancholy.
Tuesday, 25 April 2006
Revised, Saturday, 31 March 2007
Translated by Dr. Bruce Gordon Doar