p. 7 Introduction p. 11 Chapter One Zhang Xiaogang’s Formative Years 1958 – 1982 p. 45 Chapter two A Distinctive Voice 1982 – 1989 p. 113 Chapter Three Return to the Human World 1990 – 1999 p. 178 Chapter Four Mutual Infiltrations 2000 – 2009 p. 234 Chapter Five The Space of Unravelling 2010 – 2013 p. 278 Artist’s Letters p. 289 Chronology p. 296 References p. 300 Index FORMATIVE YEARS 1958 – 1982 Chapter One Zhang Xiaogang’s Formative Years 1958 – 1982 In James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon, Hugh Conway looks out over the bal- cony of the lamasery to the breathtaking landscape below and contemplates the perfect isolation of the magical valley of Shangri-La to which he had attained dominion. “In the midst of the still-encompassing dream, he felt himself master of Shangri-La. These were his beloved things, all around him, the things of that inner mind in which he lived increasingly, away from the fret of the world.” 1 And yet in the end some lingering passion for the world draws him back to it. The Chinese province of Yunnan became, in the nostalgic rememberings of Zhang Xiaogang, a kind of Shangri-La. The province abuts Burma, Laos, and Viet Nam at its southern border and, like Sichuan, which lies directly above it, the northern- most extension of Yunnan shares a border to the west with Tibet. Guizhou lies to the east in the direction of Hunan and nearly a thousand miles beyond that, to the north and east, are Nanjing, Shanghai, the Pacific coast, and the Yellow and Yangtze River Valleys which are the historic center of China. The rugged moun- tainous terrain and the multitude of ethnicities in Yunnan and Sichuan made them foreign to the mainstream of Chinese people. The Mongol armies annexed the area in the thirteenth century, but it remained an exotic place until the Qing court forced millions of Han Chinese to settle there in the seventeenth century. 2 The major cities of Yunnan, like Kunming, Dali, and Lijiang, were notoriously inaccessible. Many areas lacked paved roads through most of the twentieth cen- tury. The first railroad connection to Kunming was built by the French in 1910, connecting the city with Hanoi to the south. But it wasn’t until 1966 that Yunnan was linked to the Chinese domestic rail system.3 Diqing, primarily inhabited by Tibetans, lies just to the north of Lijiang and was among the most isolated towns in China. When James Hilton’s novel became known in China, people saw so much resemblance between Diqing and Hilton’s ‘Shangri-la’ that in 2001 the people of Diqing officially renamed their city after the novel. Zhang Xiaogang was born on 22 February 1958,4 in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan. He still keeps Yunnan in a part of his imagination, as a bucolic, harmoni- ous world, tucked away in deep mountains like the beautiful valley of Shangri-La where time stands still. He returns every year to Yunnan and Sichuan for a kind of rejuvenation. Zhang spent the first five years of his life in Kunming. His parents were government officials. FORMATIVE YEARS 1958 – 1982 16 frequently changed, they always managed to provide for the family. Until 1949 both parents had served in the army ; his father began as a foot soldier and eventually rose to regiment political supervisor. Then Zhang’s parents became government bureaucrats. His father moved up from a position with the econom- ics department of the Yunnan Provincial Government to ‘Economics Committee Chief of the Southwest District’, based in Chengdu. Zhang’s mother served as a secretary at the Prosecutor General’s office there. 5 The move to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, occurred in 1963, when Zhang was five, and he spent most of his childhood there. Then in 1973, at the age of fourteen, Zhang moved with his parents back to Kunming. Shy and withdrawn as a child, Zhang remembers his loneliness. But this may also relate to the particular dysfunction in his family. ‘From as early as I can remem- ber,’ he told an interviewer, ‘I felt our family was not normal.’ 6 His parents never invited guests to their home, nor was he allowed to visit his friends’ homes. ‘I was very young when I became aware of my mother’s illness. She would be fine for days and then change, one minute crying inconsolably, the next laughing hysterically. She attacked people verbally on the street and would go out and get herself lost for days. But then she would be normal again. Although she was always so very nice to me, as a child, I found it terrifying.’ 7 Zhang Xiaogang singled out three defining memories of his childhood. 8 The first one intimates much about his relationship with his mother. She put a piece of white paper and a crayon on their dining table for him when he was about three years old, he recalls. It was a nurturing gesture and at the same time an expecta- tion. He remembers wanting to draw a soldier with an angry expression on that paper but no matter how hard he tried the soldier’s expression came out sad, not angry. That sadness pervaded Zhang Xiaogang’s early life and stayed with him until 1989 when historical events forced him out of himself and he marshaled the inner resources to transcend his past and mature as an artist into the authority that has characterized his work ever since. In the second of the three memories, Zhang Xiaogang still vividly recalls his feelings about walking home from school by himself at around the age of six. The walk home frightened him. But more frightening still was the long, dimly lit hallway in the communal apartment. The hallway seemed endless as he passed by the doors of other families in the old Soviet style apartment block to the rooms at the end of the hall in which his family lived. His parents had been assigned two adjacent rooms at the far end of the building, sharing a communal toilet and kitchen with their neighbors.9 Like most families, they had a small stove inside their rooms ; the outer room served as the family kitchen, dining room, family room, and as a bedroom for Zhang Xiaogang and his three brothers. But of the four children only Zhang Xiaogang was permitted in his parents’ bedroom. The details of these rooms still resonate in his work. The artist’s memory of the small space of the apartment and of that dark hallway inspired the claustropho - bia of his paintings of 1990–91 and later the closed, airless spaces of his Green Wall series. FIG 1.0 My Father, 2012 The third emblematic memory concerns the artist’s relationship with his father. oil on canvas, 140 · 220 cm At the age of eight or nine, Zhang Xiaogang stole from his father’s wallet, wanting to impress his friends. He took a twenty-cent bill from the wad of cash inside the billfold which his father kept in the bedroom. The boy didn’t expect that such a small amount would be missed. His father noticed, but said nothing. When Zhang Xiaogang tried to steal for the second time, his father caught him with his FIG 4.02 FIG 4.03 My Daughter No. 2, 2000 Bloodline - Big Family No. 10, 2000 oil on canvas, 40 · 50 cm oil on canvas, 200 · 300 cm RETURN TO THE HUMAN WORLD 1990 – 1999 124 Much of Zhang Xiaogang’s work in 1993 was devoted to preparation for an exhi- bition consisting of four thematic sections : ‘friends, public buildings, private life and family’, to be held at the end of the year in the Sichuan Museum of Art in Chengdu. In The Old Wood Box (for the ‘private life’ section) the book crate sits on the brick tiled floor, positioned in the room like the Gate to the Forbidden City overlooking the paved square in the Tian’anmen paintings, which he painted at around the same time. The wood box (filled with the personal affects of the artist’s past) and the images of Tian’anmen (redolent with emotional ties to Zhang’s Chinese identity) return again to Zhang’s exploration of private and public history in the construction of his own psyche. FIG 3.21 Red Baby, 1993 The expressionist handling of the ground In The Old Wood Box and in the four oil on canvas, 144.5 · 155 cm paintings of Tian’anmen perseveres from the two paintings of The Birth of the Republic and from Bloodline – Big Family, Mother and Son No. 1. This textured, gestural brushwork continues to refer to the strong emotional baggage of the artist’s past in the time of the Cultural Revolution. Zhang pushed it to the edges as a painted frame in these and in the other paintings of 1993, and abandoned it altogether in the paintings of 1994 and after. By contrast with The Birth of the Republic paintings, the work of 1993 announces a new, more sparse and detached style of painting as Zhang Xiaogang struggles to make sense of things, to deal with the traumas of the Cultural Revolution, and of his own troubled family history. ‘For me,’ he explained, ‘the Cultural Revolution is a psychological state, not a historical fact. It has a very strict connection with my childhood, and I think there are many things linking the psychology of the Chinese people today with the psychology of the Chinese people back then.’ The compositional activity in Red Baby [FIG 3.21], also painted in 1993, looks back to The Birth of the Republic paintings, although the style is more restrained overall, as are the other paintings of 1993, and like them it has a framing edge of expressionist brushwork.