Return To China
At the end of his studies in Brussels in 1935, Zhang made a tour of France, Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Italy before returning home to China. Upon his arrival back in Shanghai in 1936, Zhang held a number of shows exhibiting his drawings and sculptures. He also established the Chongren Studio to further his art and to teach.
Hergé lost contact with him during the invasion of China by Japan (which is usually regarded as the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War) and the subsequent civil war. More than four decades would pass before the two friends would meet again. In an instance of life mirroring art, Hergé managed to resume contact with his old friend Zhang Chongren, years after Tintin rescued the fictional Chang in the closing pages of Tintin in Tibet. Zhang had been reduced to a street sweeper by the Cultural Revolution, before becoming the head of the Fine Arts Academy in Shanghai during the 1970s.
After the economic liberalisation of China from 1979, Zhang received widespread acknowledgment in the Chinese art community. A collection of his oil paintings and sculptures were published and in his later years, Zhang worked as an editor and translator of several books on art. Among the portraits he has painted are those of Chinese paramount leader Deng Xiaoping and French President François Mitterrand.
Zhang returned to Europe for a reunion with Hergé in 1981 upon invitation of the French government. In 1989 he received French citizenship and settled down to teach in Paris (Nogent sur Marne), where he died in 1998. Shortly after his death, a memorial museum dedicated to him was established in Shanghai. A number of his paintings and sculptures are held in the China Museum of Fine Art in Beijing and the China Museum of Revolutionary Warfare.
Read more about this topic: Zhang Chongren
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“Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing—to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.”
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“It all ended with the circuslike whump of a monstrous box on the ear with which I knocked down the traitress who rolled up in a ball where she had collapsed, her eyes glistening at me through her spread fingers—all in all quite flattered, I think. Automatically, I searched for something to throw at her, saw the china sugar bowl I had given her for Easter, took the thing under my arm and went out, slamming the door.”
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