Zhang Xiaogang - Life and Career

Life and Career

Zhang was born to parents, Qi Ailan and Zhang Jing (both government officials) in the city of Kunming in China's Yunnan province in 1958, and was the third of four brothers. Zhang's mother, Qi Ailan taught him how to draw as an activity to keep him out of trouble:

“From early on, my parents worried that I would go out and get into trouble. So they gave us paper and crayons so we could draw at home. . . . I gained more and more interest in art. I had a lot of time, because I didn't have to go to school. My interest increased. After I became an adult, I never gave up art. So that's how I started to draw.”

His parents were taken away for 3 years by the Chinese government for reeducation. He came of age during the 1960s and 1970s political upheavals known as the Cultural Revolution, which exerted a certain influence on his painting.

In 1972, at age 14 Xiaogang was sent to be retrained as a farmer as part of the “Down to the Countryside” movement but maintained a continued passion for art. Chinese water color painter, Lin Ling trained Xiaogang in 1975, teaching him formal water color and sketching techniques.

“When I was 17, I told myself I wanted to be an artist. . . I felt that art was like a drug. Once you are addicted, you can't get rid of it.”

Upon the reinstitution of collegiate entrance exams, Xiaogang was accepted into the Sichuan Academy of Fine arts in 1977 where he began study oil based painting in 1978. At the time of his collegiate education, Zhang's professors continued to teach styles of Revolutionary Realism as instituted by Chairman Mao. This only served to inspired Xiaogang and his peers to opt for topics of western philosophy and introspective individualism while shunning political and ideological subject matter.

In 1982, he graduated from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in the city of Chongqing in Sichuan province but was denied a teaching post he had hoped for. This led Zhang to fall into a period of depression between 1982-1985. During this time he worked as a construction worker and art director for a social dance troupe in Kunming. It was a time of intense self-examination for Xiaogang as he had difficulties fitting in to society. Suffering from alcoholism, he was hospitalized in 1984 with alcohol induced internal bleeding causing him to paint "The Ghost Between Black and White" series which put visual form to his visions of life and death in the hospital.

“At that time, my inspiration primarily came from the private 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 dawned, groaning sounds rose above the hospital and some of the withering bodies around had gone to waste and were drifting on the brink of death: these deeply stirred my feelings. They were so close to my then life experiences and lonely miserable soul.”

In 1985 Xiaogang began to emerge from the dark time in his life and joined the New Wave movement in China that saw a philosophical, artistic and intellectual explosion in Chinese culture.

Zhang formed the South West Art Group in 1986 including fellow artists, Mao Xuhui, Pan Dehei, and Ye Yongqing among more than 80 others. The group moved for ‘an anti-urban regionalism` and also explored individual desire which according to Zhang had been suppressed by collectivist rationalization. They created self funded exhibitions which were a foundational step in the Chinese Avant-Garde movement.

In 1988 Zhang was appointed as an instructor at Sichuan Academy's Education Department and married later that year. He took part in the China/Avant-Garde Exhibition in 1989 at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. However, the Tiananmen Square incident abruptly ended this period of liberal reform.

Zhang traveled to Germany in 1992 for 3 months gaining unprecedented perspective on his own Chinese cultural identity. Upon returning he had a newfound desire to explore and revitalize his own personal past along with recent Chinese history through painting.

Had a major conceptual breakthrough after discovering his family photos which reminded him of the memories destroyed by the contextual cultural setting of the time.

“I felt very excited, as if a door had opened. I could see a way to paint the contradictions between the individual and the collective and it was from this that I started really to paint. There’s a complex relationship between the state and the people that I could express by using the Cultural Revolution. China is like a family, a big family. Everyone has to rely on each other and to confront each other. This was the issue I wanted to give attention to and, gradually, it became less and less linked to the Cultural Revolution and more to people’s states of mind.”

Xiaogang was particularly inspired by a photograph of his mother as a young attractive woman, a far cry from sickly, schizophrenic woman she had become. Led him to paint the BLOODLINES series which illustrated the entanglement of private and public life. In the mid 1990s, he exhibited all over the world including Brazil, France, Australia, UK and the US.

Like Wang Guangyi, Xu Beihong and Wu Guanzhong, Zhang Xiaogang is a best-selling contemporary Chinese artist and a favorite of foreign collectors. His paintings feature prominently in the 2005 film Sunflower.

In 2007, a canvas of his sold for US$6 million at Sotheby's while in April 2011 his 1988 triptych oil work Forever Lasting Love, of half-naked figures in an arid landscape suffused with mystical symbols, sold for HK$79 million (US$10.1 million), a record auction price for a contemporary artwork from China, in Hong Kong.

He is represented by Pace Gallery in New York/Beijing and Beijing Commune in Beijing for his prints.