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Lot Essay
In the two Zhang Xiaogang Bloodline series (Lot 2416)paintings featured here , the artist offers two figures who are almost identical in their noses, the arch of their brows, the smallness of their mouths, down to the shape of their skulls. Indeed, the characteristics that set them apart seem more like jarring and unwanted aberrations - as with the girl's blunt, almost androgynous haircut, or the boy's surprised expression. In scale, they echo the themes of childhood and one's relationship to a larger collective first found in Zhang's mid-1990s works of the same size, but in style, conception, and execution, they also significantly move the series into deeper aesthetic territory.
Their eyes are the darkest and most arresting aspect of the paintings. In conventional portraiture, the eyes classically serve as "the windows to the soul", revealing one's character and inner spirit. With Zhang however, the eyes are limpid black pools, the dark pupils overtaking the color of the iris, drawing us to the intensity of their gaze, which is then revealed to be strangely unfocused and directionless. As a result, the figures appear depthless, as if in a protracted state of shock or a fugue state.
As such their internal psychological state is denied the viewer, but something of their nature is projected into the scarring patches of light adhering to their features. The girl's soft pink flesh renders her innocence mysteriously vulnerable; the red patches suggest the unspoken and unknowable experiences that might lie ahead in any life, and alter not only one's fate but the fiber of one's very being. As such, Zhang radically reorders the viewer's taken for granted notions of portraiture, representation, and subjectivity. Inherent to his practice are his concepts of memory and amnesia, the ways in which our view of the past is imbued with our feelings in the present, and vice versa. As a theory of individual subjectivity, it is hopelessly fatalistic; but as a metaphor for the collective state of the nation, it is profoundly humanistic, offering a powerful and poetic vision of a generations' uncertainty, turmoil, and hope. It is Zhang's unique ability to fuse painterly form with symbolism and metaphor that has established him as one of the great interpreters of Chinese experience of his generation.
Their eyes are the darkest and most arresting aspect of the paintings. In conventional portraiture, the eyes classically serve as "the windows to the soul", revealing one's character and inner spirit. With Zhang however, the eyes are limpid black pools, the dark pupils overtaking the color of the iris, drawing us to the intensity of their gaze, which is then revealed to be strangely unfocused and directionless. As a result, the figures appear depthless, as if in a protracted state of shock or a fugue state.
As such their internal psychological state is denied the viewer, but something of their nature is projected into the scarring patches of light adhering to their features. The girl's soft pink flesh renders her innocence mysteriously vulnerable; the red patches suggest the unspoken and unknowable experiences that might lie ahead in any life, and alter not only one's fate but the fiber of one's very being. As such, Zhang radically reorders the viewer's taken for granted notions of portraiture, representation, and subjectivity. Inherent to his practice are his concepts of memory and amnesia, the ways in which our view of the past is imbued with our feelings in the present, and vice versa. As a theory of individual subjectivity, it is hopelessly fatalistic; but as a metaphor for the collective state of the nation, it is profoundly humanistic, offering a powerful and poetic vision of a generations' uncertainty, turmoil, and hope. It is Zhang's unique ability to fuse painterly form with symbolism and metaphor that has established him as one of the great interpreters of Chinese experience of his generation.