IMAGE CRITIQUE 3

Xiaogang ZHANG 張 曉剛, Bloodline — Big Family No. 12, 1997, oil on canvas, 190cm x 260cm.

The painting depicts a III extended family, from grandfather to the children, but there is no expression of character, both adults and children sit quietly. In fact, I can understand the meaning of the expression, in my grandfather's house I have ever seen such pictures, black and white photographs, everyone blankly sitting together, that's my grandfather is old China, people's clothes monotonous black and white, no fashion design and color. Photo Gallery also just developed in old China, and there is no method for a variety of pictures, if flips Chinese 50s or 60s of old photographs, most of them are of this type.

In my opinion, Zhang Xiaogang these old photographs in black and white for the background work, was able to become a kind of visual symbol of Chinese contemporary art, is that he excavated the memories of our survival, to the Chinese people have lost cultural image provided Retrospection language of the specimen.

His works may fit some Westerners imagine socialist China is his work look. But in fact misread, that is not today's Chinese people, but the contemporary Chinese people have put too much history to change at least 50 years of tradition, almost a destructive erase memories. But in Zhang's works, we can still feel the memory line, can wake up a lot of past memories. The use of modern and contemporary Chinese style pop art portrait expression profiling revolutionary era, to convey the sense of having a collective mental age of memories and emotions. This kind of social, collective and family, kinship typical presentation and simulation is a re-interpretation, from art, emotion and departure angles of life, and thus has a strong contemporary significance.

Personally, I still like him these works, I think these works appeared, and continued his consistent questioning of life forms, which implies his history, time, and other concepts of life and death more mature awareness. I saw that mature after Zhang lonely heart, thus also seems to understand why he would salvage old photos that history, and handled hazy reasons.