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Lot Essay
After Modern China had undergone ten years of political upheavals, its vulnerable populace lost the ability to restore the balance of a worldview tempered by religious consolation, a void from which unavoidably springs a sense of desolation and desperation. This social tableau set the stage for Zhang Xiaogang to embark on his studies at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 1977, just after the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). As a consequence, Zhang is a painter on an unending quest to explore the inner self. Looking back over his entire creation of the 1980s, it appears that he persisted throughout in his search for an oracle of life’s answers, but his end-of-decade work Vast Ocean (Lot 149) evidently depicts a mystical theocratic state, one devoid of political leaders, a polytheist idyll in which multiple gods coexist, as if through his paintings he creates a ‘divinity’ and a credo for himself, hoping that this will bring about an unconditional redemption of his own unbearably wounded spirit.
The exquisite painting techniques in Vast Ocean add a touch of beauty to Zhang Xiaogang’s artistic traits in The Other Side: in contrast to the rough brush strokes of the first half of the 1980s, his oil paintings on cardboard exhibit extremely subtle permutations of colour and exude a sense of translucent, watercolour-like appeal, with the fine working of the contour lines imparting to this work in oil the gentle directness of a pencil sketch, with past fluctuations in mood nebulously dissolving into patches of smooth colour, and the skilled use of the technique of previews appearing a few years after the launch of the Bloodline: Big Family Series.
The ocean is often used as a metaphor for the origin of life. It was not a subject matter that Zhang Xiaogang often explored in the 1980s. During that period, he favoured the settings of earth and confined spaces. For this reason, Vast Ocean is an extraordinarily rare work. The painting was created in an era that desperately sought intellectual release. As the ocean possesses the tremendous power to nourish life, it is a perfect metaphor for the desire to heal the present and nurture the future.
The exquisite painting techniques in Vast Ocean add a touch of beauty to Zhang Xiaogang’s artistic traits in The Other Side: in contrast to the rough brush strokes of the first half of the 1980s, his oil paintings on cardboard exhibit extremely subtle permutations of colour and exude a sense of translucent, watercolour-like appeal, with the fine working of the contour lines imparting to this work in oil the gentle directness of a pencil sketch, with past fluctuations in mood nebulously dissolving into patches of smooth colour, and the skilled use of the technique of previews appearing a few years after the launch of the Bloodline: Big Family Series.
The ocean is often used as a metaphor for the origin of life. It was not a subject matter that Zhang Xiaogang often explored in the 1980s. During that period, he favoured the settings of earth and confined spaces. For this reason, Vast Ocean is an extraordinarily rare work. The painting was created in an era that desperately sought intellectual release. As the ocean possesses the tremendous power to nourish life, it is a perfect metaphor for the desire to heal the present and nurture the future.