Beschreibung:

Zhang Xiaogang Bloodline Series No. 53 1997 Oil on canvas. 15 3/8 x 11 1/4 in. (39.1 x 28.6 cm). Signed and dated “Zhang Xiaogang 1997” lower right.
Provenance Schoeni Art Gallery Ltd, Hong Kong Catalogue Essay There is a quietly seductive, as well as disturbing, appeal to Zhang’s paintings. They hover between realistic depiction and dreamy illusion. Zhang has achieved this by bringing together a number of polarities. Zhang uses a technique based on western academic realism to suggest unreality and illusion; he portrays a private insular world by means of a public artistic language, hinting at unspoken public trauma through individuals’ secrets. Over twenty years, Zhang has managed to resolve his own stylistic passage from an early expressionistic period to a form of classicism. In both its technique and thematic concerns, Zhang Xiaogang’s art has become a canon of contemporary Chinese oil painting, and its merits depend very much on the fact that he has found new solutions to harnessing western classical academic technique (a standard in Chinese academies) to turn it into an indigenous artistic language… The skills of realism have been used by Zhang to depict a situation that seems to be neither real nor imaginary, drawing the audience into the other reality of art. In a realm straddling reality and fantasy, the viewer is invited to linger upon the ambiguities bordering that which is public and the private, memory and forgetfulness, personal and public traumas. This is perhaps the artistic reason for Zhang’s success in the recent decade. He has reinvented a classical icon to articulate both unutterable public taboos as well as each person’s private secrets. T. Z. Chang, Between Reality and Illusion, Hanart Gallery, 2004 Read More