Tang Zhigang: Rewriting Memory through Paintings
For the majority of Chinese people, 1976 was a tense year of crisis. Premier Zhou Enlai passed away in January, prompting protest gatherings in Tiananmen Square which lasted from late March until the Qingming Festival in April. This was an important political incident, as most people had begun to feel fatigue and even revulsion towards the decade-old Cultural Revolution. People began to realize that there was something seriously wrong with Chinese life and society, and a tiny minority understood that the nation’s political life had to change.
The events of Qingming and historical memory led many to feel the need to express their dissatisfaction. The death of Zhou Enlai was a catalyst, because he gave everyone the impression of being diligent, amiable and warm, qualities that normal people craved. During the previous 27 years, people had been finding it more and more difficult to find such spiritual comfort. Despite all of this, this spontaneous mass gathering in Tiananmen Square was declared to be a ‘counterrevolutionary riot’.
In July of that year, the city of Tangshan in eastern Hebei was rocked by an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale. Official reports announced that 242,000 people died in this earthquake, but even during the rescue work, intraparty political struggles did not stop. Deng Xiaoping, who over a year earlier had been restored to office and then quickly demoted, was still being criticized all across the country.
Chairman Mao passed away in September, and most people thought that the sky would fall, because they had long been taught that the country would never be able to progress without such a great man. But shortly afterwards, on 14 October, Mao Zedong’s window, Jiang Qing, and three other national leaders – Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan – were arrested. They were branded the ‘Gang of Four’, the ‘source of all evil’ and they were blamed for the previous national economic and political disaster. The spiritual state of the Chinese people in 1976 moved from grief and oppression to excitement.
It was in the winter of that year that Tang Zhigang became a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army. His father, who for four years been known as a ‘historical counterrevolutionary’, had been freed the year before and restored as a high ranking official in the army. With his military background and position as Kunming Military District Communications Chief, was not only able to assure his son a position in the military, but could ensure that the armed forces took good care of him.
At that time, the goal of many young people was to become a soldier and a civilian officer. As Tang Zhigang had loved to paint since he was a child, he naturally became involved in propaganda work and preparing reports. Until he left the service in 1996, Tang traveled, mostly as a civilian, wherever the military went, even to the battle front.
Tang Zhigang’s military experience had a strong influence on his understanding of art. The demarcation lines between the system and ideology, his father’s fate, the opportunities of a transformative period and his memories from youth came to form his complex psychological background. They formed an unconscious reservoir, and would present themselves in a special way when new elements came into play.
From 1976 to 1980, there were no apparent changes in the world of Chinese art. Within a confined space, the efforts of a tiny minority of modernist experimenters, such as members of the Stars Art Group, appeared to have had only limited influence. Popular in the Chinese art world at the time were paintings on revolutionary themes by painters under the influence of Soviet styles and concepts. Typical was Guangdong artist Chen Yanning’s Chairman Mao Inspecting a Guangdong Village (Mao zhuxi shicha Guangdong nongcun), exhibited at the China Art Gallery’s National Art Exhibition Commemorating the 30th Anniversary of Mao Zedong Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature, which opened on 23 May 1972. Other works shown at that exhibition were Chairman Mao Working on Mass Production (Mao zhuxi zai da shengchan yundong zhong), a collaboration between Zhang Ziyi, Cai Liang and Zhan Beixin, and Yang Xiaoming’s oil painting Never Give up the Fight (Yong bu xiu zhan) More recent classics included Shang Ding’s Continue the Fight (Lianxu zuozhan, 1974), He Kongde’s Keeping in Step is the Only Way to Victory (Budiao yizhi cai neng shengli, 1975) and Chen Yifei’s Occupation of Nanjing (Zhanling Nanjing, 1977).
Tang Zhigang idolized the soldier-painter He Kongde for a long time, and in Tang’s oil life studies from before 1981, we can see his interest in blocks, structures and tones. These indulgences, which can only be understood by those with the historical experience exemplified by the above listed paintings, became the template that would be universally studied.
If we could look at the propaganda paintings that he made for the army during this period, we see influences like He Kongde’s Life Persists and the Charge is Endless (Shengming buxi, chongfeng buzhi, 1971) in his works’ formulaic structure, relaxed strokes and simple taste. That style was of course universal in China at the time. The few artists who became the models for everyone to emulate attained their status because of their themes, their excellent personal styles and the special positions they occupied.
Tang Zhigang saw these works in the print materials from those exhibitions and in other pictorial publications. He understood their talents and style, and made them an object of his studies. The sinified Soviet style lasted for nearly twenty years, if we mark its beginning with K.M. Maximov holding an oil painting training class in China in 1956. In the army Tang Zhigang had direct models for this style of painting and the opportunity to attend regular exhibitions, for example the National People’s Liberation Army Exhibition, but he had few influences outside the military. In his outlook, he was quite unlike those youths who had no place in society and who could discover for themselves the massive changes in society. Nor did he have any exposure to discussions about modernism.
Regardless, his friends Zhang Xiaogang and Ye Yongqing had already begun modernist experimentations, and even before that, works such as Gao Xiaohua’s Why (Wei shenmo, 1978) and I Love the Oil Fields (Wo ai youtian, 1978), Cheng Conglin’s Snow on X Day X Month, 1968 (1968 nian X yue X ri xue, 1979), Wang Hai’s Spring (Chun, 1979), Wang Chuan’s Goodbye! Little Road (Zaijian ba! Xiaolu, 1980), Luo Zhongli’s Father (Fuqin) and He Duoling’s The Spring Wind is Reborn (Chunfeng yijing suxing) had introduced serious doubts about the big issues in the Chinese art world of the recent past. In the army, Tang Zhigang only knew of changes in the field of art through magazines and other print materials.
When Zhang Xiaogang and others spread news about the new art while they were back in Kunming during the vacations, Tang Zhigang would have gleaned something about the latest developments, directly or otherwise, and only by virtue of his personal relations did this Liberation Army soldier begin to have doubts about the concepts to which he was accustomed.
In 1984, as 14 coastal cities were opening to the outside world, China’s war with Vietnam dragged on. Tang Zhigang received orders from the newspaper National Defense Warriors (Guofang zhanshi bao) in June to travel to the Laoshan front line and report on the war with Vietnam. The tragedy and spectacle of war were a shock to him. He saw surreal scenes that he could not express through the expressive methods and language he was used to. What methods could an artist use to tell of the death of soldiers and the absurd psychological effects of those deaths? An indulgence in cold tones, set by tranquil blocks, lively strokes and warm tones was unable to convey his personal understanding of this reality.
For thirty years, from 1949 to the early eighties, the themes for expressing war were universal, but no one could cast off the artistic and conceptual principles of Soviet socialist realism and Chinese revolutionary realism and romanticism. Eulogy and the glorification of solemn, heroic and positive traits were the norms that artists respected. Neither terror nor tragedy appear in works like Pan He’s Arduous Times (Jianku suiyue), Qi Zongxiang’s Forcing Across Dadu River (Qiangdu Daduhe), Lü Sibai’s Warriors of Wazi Street (Wazi-jie zhandou), Ai Zhongxin’s Red Army Crossing the Snow Mountain (Hongjun guo xueshan), Dong Xiwen’s The Red Army Fears Not the Long Journey (Hongjun bupa yuanzheng nan), Hou Yimin’s Crossing the Yalu River (Kuaguo Yalüjiang), Feng Fasi’s Liu Hulan, Zhan Jianjun’s Five Heroes of Wolftooth Mountain (Langyashan wu zhuangshi) and Jin Shanshi’s Heroes Never Surrender (Yingyong buqu). The spirit of revolution and heroism had become the expressive themes for artists.
The work Occupation of Nanjing, completed in 1977 by Tang Zhigang’s favorite artist Chen Yifei, became the classic of the era. The people saw that while the artist gave sufficient expression to the themes of revolution and its heroic viewpoints, he was beginning to focus on personal artistic indulgences, using fine brush strokes, grey tones and an arrangement that bordered on naturalism. To modernists, these characteristic really provided no explanation of any linguistic issues. They were simply the reproduction of Soviet painting techniques through a Chinese artist’s filter. The issues of indulgence and grey tones took Chen Yifei’s work beyond the official norms for art and literature, but after October 1976, no one paid attention to these small transcendences, and so Chen’s Occupation of Nanjing made a universal impact on young Chinese painters.
China’s opening to the outside world from 1976 to 1984 provided young Chinese artists with a refreshing field of vision and concepts. Through art magazines, such as Art Research (Meishu yanjiu), World Art (Shijie yishu) and Art Translations (Meishu yicong), Western art books published by local art publishing houses across the country and through exhibitions, they slowly became familiar with the vocabularies of impressionism, fauvism, expressionism, abstract art and surrealism, and came to realize that expression did not need to be limited by realist methods.
The most important thing was that they already had space for free expression, and they could rearrange their own expressive methods according to their understanding of art and life. At this point, what Tang focused on was not heroic forms, because what he witnessed was specific brutality, death and absurdity. Tang saw grim scenes such as shit pile, the open-air latrine for the soldiers in wartime, where the collective feces were piled up to facilitate inspections for general heath. He explains:
The Vietnamese artillery, as if it had telescopic vision, rained down on the latrine of the ‘old workers and soldiers’. The small mountain was smashed in half and massive amounts of muck came flowing down like a waterfall, right onto the heads of the soldiers. The soldiers were basically covered in their own shit as they fought to the death with the enemy, but they couldn’t worry about that. After the battle, wow! The giant shit pile had been blasted away to god knows where. From: ‘Shit Falling from the Sky’ (Shi cong tian jiang), in Tang Zhigang: Meeting in the Painting (Tang Zhigang: Huazhong huiyi), HanArt.
Tang Zhigang was left with indestructible memories. He was not prompted to go off to investigate the party’s understanding and perspective on history and reality as were He Kongde and Shang Ding, but he set his eyes on the things and issues that really moved him. He did not go out to consider the postures of martyrs and heroes, but looked at real terror and corpses. What he focused on was the reality before his eyes, ignoring the forms required of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism. Although Chen Yifei and Shang Ding had already experimented and moved beyond the standard model, Tang Zhigang did not follow a simple revisionist path forward.
Beautiful and relaxed colors and strokes could not express the realities of death and burial. He had to use a new methodology, and so his 1984 Military Spirit (Junhun) series came to be entirely different from the standards that were officially required. The artist used expressionist, almost surrealist, forms to express the meaning of the military spirit. Sorrow, gloom and abnormality denote this series. Shouts of wives emerge from the sky and death is portrayed in very concrete terms. The composition, mood and forms were completely incompatible with official demands. Tang Zhigang, as an army artist, had clearly gone far beyond the legal and required aesthetic standards.
Many years passed, and that war became history. The soldier-artist, who was 25 at the time, used his brush to depict the death and suicidal orders that are universal to war. This fully presented his humanist spirit, his love for people and his sentiments about their fate, and these values basically laid down the path for the artist to follow over the decade. From: ‘Soldier’s Song’ (Shibing zhi ge) in Tang Zhigang: Meeting in the Painting, HanArt.
We know that the period from 1982 to 1985 was Zhang Xiaogang’s ‘dark period’ (mogui shiqi), in which his 1984 hospital experience and his new understanding of life led him to become more interested in El Greco and expressionism. Readings of Western literature and art, coupled with his own special circumstances, led the young Zhang Xiaogang to readily accept a new vocabulary that was entirely different from that which was deemed to be ‘healthy’ and ‘positive’.
In the mid-eighties, Western modernist styles began to cause a sensation among young artists. Mao Xuhui’s work from this period, the main works featured in the 1985 New Figurative Images exhibition, was similarly expressive and constrained, mostly due to a new understanding of existentialism that came from reading Western philosophy and literature. In 1984, the government launched a small-scale political movement against ‘spiritual pollution’, but soon afterwards the legality of reform ushered in the massive ’85 New Wave Art Movement, and Western modernism was universally imitated.
The images of soldiers’ wives floating in the air and the somewhat surreal images and composition in Tang Zhigang’s Military Spirit series were not at all exceptional. Tang Zhigang did not stray too far, and he held his transformations at a level that could be totally recognized. This may have been because of his special military environment, which did not allow him to act more freely like Mao Xuhui and Zhang Xiaogang.
Tang Zhigang did not later move forward in the direction of the psychologically absurd. He lacked the personal experience of Zhang Xiaogang of illness and loneliness and he had little time to connect with the new conceptual liberation movements that were beginning, even though he observed and benefited from them. Tang Zhigang instinctively focused on reality, and he set his eyes on the daily life of the army. He felt that he could depict the normality of the lives of these sacred and solemn soldiers, and in the late eighties he completed Border (Bianjing, 1986), Platform (Jingtai, 1986), On theWay to Training (Lalian tu zhong, 1987) and Provisions (Jiyang, 1988).
In these works, we do not see any marked divergences from accepted norms, even though his Platform was included in a national military art exhibition. This small-sized work simply depicts a scene of two soldiers asking for directions and drinking water. In the composition, the soldiers lack any heroic aura and the detail of drinking water is anything but typical. The scene depicted in Asking for Directions (Wen lu, 1987) was similar, lacking any typical traits. But the extreme exaggeration and haphazard brush strokes in works he completed after 1989, such as Exercises (Caolian) and Group Class (Gongtong ke), plus his ‘lack of attention’ to the state of the people in the works, made them similar to the New Generation (Xin Shengdai) art that emerged in this period.
The mocking touches in his Playing Chess (Xiaqi, 1992), Ah (A, 1992) and Killing a Pig (Sha zhu, 1994) remind us of the works of so-called New Generation artist Song Yonghong, and Shooting (Shechu, 1996 and 1997) reveals that a satirical spirit had been unleashed in his work. Although Tang Zhigang was well a ware of what changes were taking place outside of the military, it would be wrong to assume that his artistic expression was simply following trends. His interests, personality and way of understanding issues fitted neatly with the new artistic methods of observation and expression.
His childhood curiosity, when he depicts animal and even human reproductive organs, reveals his personality, and many years later he expressed these childhood memories in works such as Horse (Ma, 1996). The reason the painter depicts the horse’s distended genitals clearly related to his early experiences. (See ‘The Past: Cold Wave in Spring’, Tang Zhigang: Meeting in the Painting, HanArt).
When a technique provides greater possibilities, an artist cannot help but incorporate it in his expressive repertoire and Tang’s expression reached a new level in Comrades in Arms (Zhanyou, 1995) and Taotie (Taotie, 1995). No one in China had ever put naked soldiers together in such a funny and unrealistic way in a traditional courtyard, lotus flowers and railings, as in a portrait studio, with the comrades posing together for a picture. But they were not wearing military uniforms. The expression of these paintings connected to the then popular New Generation, Cynical Realism and Political Pop, with even a bit of Gaudy Art thrown in. The theme was simple: even though they are soldiers, when they take off the uniforms they are just people. There are many roles in society, but, in the eyes of the artist, they are just superficial embellishments.
Tang Zhigang went from the army to the Yunnan Art Academy in 1996. He had previously paid attention to changes in art trends, but as Monica Dematte wrote in her essay on Tang Zhigang’, it was almost impossible for a foreigner to enter any military area in China. Dematte wrote that she could only wrap herself up in a jacket and hat to keep from being detected. The closed military environment was extremely inconvenient for a person like Tang Zhigang who wanted more contact with society and the art world.
Now that he was a civilian, what soldiers often call ‘non-soldiers’ (feijunren), he had frequent contact with people like Li Ji, Mao Jie, Zeng Xiaofeng and Liu Jianhua, and it appeared that he was more consciously considering issues in contemporary art. Tang Zhigang could now totally drop military themes and attempt to understand artistic problems from a wider perspective. Not long after he changed professions, he was recognized by Gallery (Hualang) editor and critic Yang Xiaoyan, who was extremely interested in Tang’s painting titled Ah. He published Tang Zhigang’s works in Gallery, and Tang’s art began to draw attention. Chen Dong, a scholar of French literature, used the term ‘post-worker-peasant-soldier painting’ (hou-gongnongbing huihua) to describe the work of painters like Tang Zhigang.
The art world of the mid-nineties was full of possibilities. The market was starting to have a noticeable effect, and the forms and means of expression were further enriching and changing the world of art. It was after 1996 that installation and performance art gradually began to emergence. Trends in painting became less noticeable and the direction of painting became an issue.
Having arrived at ‘the place’ (difang), another term used by soldiers to describe civilians and their territory, Tang Zhigang wanted to be part of the contemporary art scene. China’s ideological atmosphere, his military family background and his past experience all came together to cause Tang Zhigang to set his sights on issues involved with politics. In 1998, Tang Zhigang also brought his own inner humor to his paintings and he also placed himself in his works.
The paintings titled Can’t Hit (Dabude), Founding Ceremony of the Nation (Kaiguo dadian) and Receiving President Nixon (Jiejian Nikesong zongtong) were executed in black and white. The artist pretended that he was a historical figure and, in a mocking way, took part in the nineties post-modernist game, but the artist realized that this game was now widespread, and, if he wanted to make a genuine personal standpoint, it would be extremely difficult.
After completely the Military Spirit series he produced a series of stylized works, but then was hesitant for a long time, which we can interpret as a period of conceptual exploration. In the same period, he moved back and forth between different themes, methods of expression and starting points. It was during this time that Tang Zhigang began depicting the theme of ‘meetings’ (kaihui) in 1996.
By 1997, Tang Zhigang had completed several works depicting meetings of adults. In terms of style and interest, we can link these to popular symbols from the New Generation, Cynical Realism, Political Pop and Gaudy Art movements, but when he realized that he would have trouble distancing himself from the New Generation painters, while continuing to use their realistic composition and maintaining an illusory logic of perspective, he tried to flatten out the composition. It then bore some resemblance to the traditional Chinese scattered dot paintings.
For Tang Zhigang, giving visual expression to the ‘meeting’ theme was very natural, because a lot of his military career was spent in meetings. He would take photos, write down the slogans at the meetings and arrange the venues, meeting after meeting after meeting:
For me, meetings were one of the main activities of my life. I am a military man, having entered the ranks of the army in 1976. In twenty years in the propaganda department, it was my job to arrange venues for meetings. When I was little, imitating adults holding meetings was my only form of entertainment. Beginning in 1998 with my change of jobs, I returned to ‘the place’, coming to the Yunnan Art Academy. Now I was seeing meetings from the floor of the hall, not seeing them from the podium. You could say that watching meetings was inextricably linked with the life of the masses.
Anyone who understands Chinese contemporary history knows that these tens of thousands of countless meetings had no value whatsoever. Formalism and mandatory political interludes make up most peoples’ memories of these events. The content of the meetings was not important, and the meetings were inevitably characterized by poker faces, routine unified postures and the maintenance of discipline. These things occupied a long period of Chinese history. It was not the color, the perspective or the exaggerated postures that are important about those scenes, but the subtle facial expressions within the tranquil surface setting. Once the artist’s focal point was established, he placed the central emphasis on the details: a skewed glance, a lifted eyebrow, a cold smile or an unenthusiastic look among the unanimously raised hands. Of course, the artist knew all too well that not only military men held meetings; so did bureaucrats and people from other social strata. But only those with status, sweepingly referred to as ‘cadres’, have the possibility of speaking, raising their hands and expressing views onstage. They are the ones who wielded basic power in the political system since 1949, and they are the symbol of state political power whose words and deeds constructed the content of the political game in China.
In line with his visual habits and educational experience, Tang Zhigang’s characters in this series of works are ugly or silly, not serious and ridiculous. If the people depicted in these works were only commoners or people without social standing or influence, then the viewer might readily shrug them off. But in a nation with a context of hierarchical historical imagery, any image related to a social position, from 1949 or even 1942 onwards, was strictly regulated. People were used to the Cultural Revolution aesthetic principles that elevated the ‘red, glorious and bright’ and the ‘tall, big and perfect’, but in Tang Zhigang’s works, the military men are homely and the cadres are ugly.
It is easy to see why some critics suspected Tang Zhigang’s works. When Meeting (Kaihui) was published in the journal Mountain Tea (Shancha), one military official deduced from the ‘seating arrangements’ in the painting that one of the images was of him, which naturally brought political pressure to bear on Tang Zhigang’s work. But political problems were inevitable.
In China’s most recent history, anyone who rendered a revolutionary military man or revolutionary person ‘ugly’ was an enemy of the people, and given that the political system had not undergone any fundamental change, this kind of logic was more than likely to appear. But the Western concepts and ideologies brought in with reform and opening had weakened the effectiveness of this logic. In the mid-eighties, Western artistic and literary concepts, as well as forms of entertainment, had not only been popularized, but they had spread to the army. Even at the Laoshan front, resting soldiers carried radios and danced to disco rhythms. This kind of music would have been considered dispiriting and degenerate only a few years earlier.
Tang Zhigang ran into little trouble, but he did not need to seek out this kind of trouble, because he felt that the questions he needed to solve were artistic issues.
One of Tang Zhigang’s jobs in the army was teaching painting to military children. Tang Zhigang felt that the decade he had spent involved in children’s art education had been of benefit in terms of art education, so for a time after he left the army he continued to teach children’s classes. This type of long-term work naturally influenced him. According to the artist, if there comes a day when his paintings don’t sell, then he might continue to make a living by teaching children’s art classes.
Perhaps to avoid any further trouble with his paintings of meetings, Tang Zhigang in 1999 began turning the people in the meetings into children. The social symbolism, such as the uniforms and decorum, remained unchanged, but the adults were now children. The humor that was once expressed through facial expressions and exaggerated postures became richer with the incongruousness of the new content. Not only were the participants in the meetings replaced by children, they also brought childlike expressions and demeanor to the meeting room, making the hypothetical seriousness more theatrical.
It was no longer possible to believe that these meetings were serious, because they were just children mimicking and acting. Nor was it possible any longer to believe that the meetings were a type of serious training, like the grueling political training sessions of the past, because these were only the arbitrary and distracted performances of children. Sometimes the children put on an outward display of seriousness, raising their hands in an orderly way just like adults, but they generally remain distracted and absentminded. Sometimes the children suddenly turn the scene into a playground, bringing their favorite toys into the meeting room. They make speeches, burst out in laughter, make funny faces and even pick their noses.
The level of comedy turns the place into a preschool. The viewer is prompted to laugh, because the scenes are humorous, silly and interesting, yet the artist is unable to shield these children about to enter society from the social paraphernalia that will come with their entry into society: military uniforms, microphones, podiums, slogans and posters, and even the colors and the atmosphere that provide the backdrop of this. These details are not chosen at random, but are all historical icons and a part of historical memory.
What makes these works different is that Tang Zhigang has paraphrased this iconic memory content within his disorderly and humorous mentality. He wants to express his humor, but also wants to avoid the ideological logic brought in by too many historical icons. He has a natural way of dealing with children, as well as a natural ability to turning adults into children, and this allows him to freely express himself.
Tang Zhigang has discussed what he is attempting to do in these paintings:
People normally ask why I paint children’s meetings, and my usual response is to say that when I used to paint adult meetings, people would see themselves in the works and that led to trouble, so I started to paint children. But I use children because I’ve always been involved in children’s art education. In the army I was a propaganda cadre working in the political office, and, apart from setting up venues for meetings, writing slogans and taking photos, I also had the special job of conducting an art class for the children of the Cadre Academy. To keep the kids from messing around the base during the holidays, the commanding officer had me use art and painting to keep them in check. I did it for eight or nine years straight, and I still do it today. The studio is the classroom, and in front of the picture of the ‘meeting’ are the children raising their hands to answer my questions. It was easy connecting the two. Though it seems serendipitous, the decision to use children as specific symbols came after a lot of thought. It wasn’t just about escaping censure. From: ‘Children’s Meetings’ (Ertong kaihui), Tang Zhigang: Meeting in the Painting, HanArt.
Tang Zhigang provides a complicated explanation of his decision to use children as specific symbols, but he was suspicious of making glib links and associations between society and political problems. As he admits later in the same work: ‘Regardless of how much I try to shrink a picture and subtract superfluous factors drawn from reality, the original characteristics of the plot that are in my blood are not easily coaxed out for the attention of outsiders.
We notice that there are no words on the slogan banners at the meetings, only red strips of cloth, or tablecloths. We do not know where the scenes take place, and sometimes the portrait behind the podium is of a child. But the basic context of history reminds us that Tang’s attitude, however it originated, is irreverent and suspect. For example, the place once occupied by the portrait of a great leader should not be so haphazardly treated and toys should not he allowed in the meeting room. The reality is that when Children’s Meeting (Ertong kaihui) was published in the Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts’ academic journal in 2001, its political import was seriously questioned. This, together with some other issues raised in an article by the art critic Peng De, led to that issue of the magazine being denied distribution.
In this ‘banned’ painting, the military children were not wearing the type of military headgear they should have been wearing for a meeting, the speaker’s facial expressions evoked the possible theatricality of an adult and the ‘leaders’ in the background had all kinds of inappropriate facial expressions. Children’s toy cars, inflatable balls and toy dogs were scattered haphazardly on the podium. It was a composition totally lacking in solemnity.
So did this painting actually contain any images of revolutionary soldiers, or did this painting wholly lack any related concepts or issues? Tang Zhigang might say that turning any impossibility into a possibility will provide humor, and provide the type of psychological comfort that is necessary. For those who know history and have a deep understanding of ideological logic, this kind of comfort, expression or humor might seem provocative. From this perspective there are problems with the artist’s standpoint, and these works can be deemed politically incorrect.
Tang Zhigang’s actions are intentional. The conceptual and expressive space brought by the reform and opening has expanded creative license, and there is no serious problem in humorously mocking a soldier, an official or even a leader. There has already been a change in the historical discourse, which is in line with free and critical thinking about the relationship between history and reality.
Art rarely has an opportunity to solve a real problem or to propose a reasonable doubt in the way that philosophy can. But people’s understanding of reality requires sensitivity, and the kind of prompting that is difficult to express in language. A simple smile is perhaps enough to cause people to think about all sorts of issues. Humor can sometimes be malevolent, but in the context of a hopeless situation, humor may be the last hope.
No matter how the artist tries to evade and deny an issue, he cannot avoid the directedness of the problem. That is exactly how Chang Tsong-zung (Johnson Chang) reads Tang Zhigang’s work:
Everyone laughs when they see it. This laughter is because there is a distance between the images in the picture and real life. Distance does not mean separation. Distance hints at some kind of relationship, like the two sides of the fence still having a bit of mutual exchange and confirmation. It wouldn’t be funny if it were children being replaced by adults in the picture, and if the bureaucratic structure being mocked was one that the viewers agreed with. This would be unpleasant laughter. Tang Zhigang’s punch line is the fact that the game is being taken seriously, and one can laugh to one’s heart’s content because everyone knows that a serious matter has been willfully turned into a children’s game.(‘Tang Zhigang: Nothing More than Child’s Play’ in Tang Zhigang: Meeting in the Painting, HanArt)
The political and economic forms of the late nineties brought great potential, and China’s moves to progressively participate in globalization checked the influence of the old ideology. People could no longer take the judgmental stance they once adopted, and could believe that freedom of thought and ideas was legal. It was against this backdrop that the new wave painting that began in the nineties turned into a universal trend in China. Artists would no longer accept external guidance and rebukes. They used their own imagination and judgment to the utmost and tried to shake free of shackles, be they Eastern or Western, to highlight the historical, realistic and personal issues they encountered.
In a 2004 work, the title of which the artist changed to Chinese Fairytale (Zhongguo tonghua), fighting has erupted at a meeting. This is not a simple depiction of children at play, but a violent conflict that paraphrases history and memory. Tang Zhigang has very fresh memories of the violent scenes he witnessed on a labor reform farm as a child, as well as in society and war. He can describe in detail the downtrodden state of the political prisoners he saw at the labor reform farm where his mother taught as a cadre.
The armed struggles of the Cultural Revolution and the violent deaths on the battlefield all impressed themselves on Tang Zhigang’s subconscious. In Chinese Fairytale the artist has filtered only some of the dregs from his subconscious realm and we can see that the persistent history and memories with which Tang Zhigang is familiar cannot be brushed aside, and only through paraphrasing can they be dissolved. In the work he completed in 2004, the scenes of the struggle, the meeting and the postures of the characters are very familiar to many Chinese adults as they remember the past. Even though some of the characters still carry milk bottles, the fight taking place on the side cannot be viewed as play, because brutality is evident in the dynamics and the expressions. In the society and specific living environment of China: brutal events often happen, but they do not implicate the observers.
In 2005, viewers at the artist’s Nordica Gallery in the Loft saw his Chinese Fairytale series. In that year, Tang Zhigang had started depicting his children in outdoor settings, at the beach and by the sea. He was trying once again to cast off history and memory. It was as if he felt that those environments and plots that people readily associated with past political issues were not what he wanted. As in his early army years, when he did not want to give expression to completely unreal revolutionary plots and heroic themes, he again wanted to discover what he truly felt in his heart.
Tang Zhigang has maintained that people from Kunming are more interested in the sea, and the sea also enabled him to escape the inland city and move into a more expansive natural landscape. But he placed his pure, naïve and cute children in dangerous places, like on diving boards, gymnastic rings, at the edge of the breakers and even on the wing of a plane. He would also depict them engaged in dangerous activities, like scaling fences and high walls. These actions arise from his memories of army life, as do the images of fighting, even if the implements used in the fighting are not weapons but familiar items, like bricks and chairs. Sometimes this choice makes the scenes of fighting look even more dangerous and frightening. He has also placed copulating dogs in a temporarily set up meeting room.
Tang Zhigang sometimes feels that he has not really sufficiently implemented his expression of internalized conflict. In 2005 he began using Chinese Fairytale as a slogan. The use of the words ‘Chinese fairytale’ served to clarify the artist’s attitudes towards history and reality, and it is evident that he sees all the theatrics of his children as being related to all human problems. It is hard to say whether the critic Nie Youyu is correct when he says that the Chinese Fairytale series has ‘cast off suggestive themes of people and politics, and turned into a theme that is more about life itself and personal psychology’. But it is evident that the artist definitely hopes to bring an enhanced universality to issues treated in his works.
The content and atmosphere presented in his paintings of meetings have definitely been thinned out with time, due to changes brought on by the rapid development of the market economy. For someone born in the seventies, these paintings are already becoming boring and empty sound bites. Looking at the past thirty years of art history, it is language that is important; this directly manifests as differences in concrete expression.
Since the nineties, artists have consciously and unconsciously accepted post-modern concepts in language and thought. If we discard the perspectives of psychology and essentialism, how can we analyze an artwork? Tang Zhigang, in a specific environment, moved from a modernist to a post-modernist standpoint. He did his best to control the ever-looming possibilities of reflection theory logic, and when a new point of departure became available, he turned his attention towards the goal of adding more theatrical and conceptual elements to his works. Whenever life reached a new juncture, he would turn his expression towards a new target.
This is what happened with his new series, Emerald (Lübaoshi). The large number of stones in the paintings came about because the artist had recently contracted gallstones. But once those stones were simplified, he freely and expressively stacked them up to create a new visual realm for the children in his works. We now see Tang Zhigang’s most typical expressive method: simple image composition, never-aging children, adept blocking and clean colors.
In line with his psychological development, Tang Zhigang progressively removed specific elements from his work and abstracted elements that he felt belonged to art, those states of crisis that always appear to varying degrees in his work and he made them mere starting points. Once the potential for expression became a reality, he was more interested in abstract compositions and brush strokes full of personality. The result is that the paintings have been cleared of reality or of traces that people can associate with reality.
New painting after 2000 often carries the label ‘conceptual painting’, although critics have never clearly explained the meaning of ‘conceptual painting’ or even what they mean by ‘conceptual’. The truth of the matter is that trend-based art began to dissolve in the mid- to late-nineties, and no one has seen the emergence of a new trend since then. In fact, after the conceptual liberation of the eighties, which encompassed politics, economics, culture, morals and beliefs, the market economy of the nineties, under the circumstances created by uneven reforms in politics and economics, created new ideological standards. The source of influence changed and the old ideological controls visibly weakened. Therefore the conceptual space that was provided by the eighties was greatly enriched. Personal psychological traits became the starting point for each artist, and they no longer ‘unified’ their own ideas and perceptions. People waiting to see another trend emerge were out of luck.
In new painting, where there are so many styles, Tang Zhigang’s paintings can be categorized as the type that deal with memory, but are under the influence of non-essentialism. Tang Zhigang is being pulled in two directions: history and the present. To understand his paintings, we can decode them either from the direction of history or in terms of the game. In his most recent works, Tang Zhigang has opened up the potential for a new starting point in his art.
Do his brushstrokes now lack respect for He Kongde? Do those people’s expressions have no connection to adults? Are his children, confidently standing on top of piles of stones and coordinating the movement of the stones, entirely out of danger? Will that child standing high up on the diving board really jump?
These questions imply that there is no post-modern element that can isolate the context of any issue. Tang Zhigang still wants to express issues related to forward motion, height, advancing and climbing. As he once remarked: ‘Jumping in the water is anxiety. Once you go up there, how will you get back down?’ The painting of the new century carries forward elements of history and, with just a bit of paraphrasing, it can become a usable resource.
Tang Zhigang has had the unfortunate experience of political problems in his family, and has deeply experienced the brutality of war, but he does not feel that the direct expression of these has any significance. There are common aspects in every story, and the artist’s task is to express, through emotional and rational means, a shared sense of the preciousness, vulnerability and significance of life, and in expressing this, the so-called ‘withered brush’ (kubi) and ‘flowing brushstrokes’ (liutang de bichu) are only indirect symbols for the problems of life, like the compositions of the artist that break up the solemnity of the meetings he depicts. Since the mid-nineties, Tang Zhigang has ceaselessly aimed to put the potential for humor in his works. At first, the humor was easily directed, but later the artist gradually caught hold of the heart of the humor, by signaling a problem and at the same time showing us the suspense surrounding it, involving us all in the decision of whether or not to solve the problem. But he is deeply aware that there are no solutions to the problems of life. In life’s final struggle, the strongest thing to do is to submit in part to the decay and our instincts, and face the problem with humor by not solving it. Scholars sometimes describe this as a ‘deconstructionist’ attitude, so Tang Zhigang’s understanding of deconstruction is both humorous and effective.
Friday, 10 October 2007
Translated by Dr. Bruce Gordon Doar