Zhang Xiaogang

Zhang Xiaogang (张晓刚 Born in 1958 in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province, in Southwestern China) is a contemporary Chinese symbolist and surrealist. Paintings in his Bloodline series are often monochromatic, stylized portraits of Chinese people, usually with large, dark-pupil eyes, posed in a stiff manner deliberately reminiscent of family portraits from the 1950s and 1960s.

Since then Zhang Xiaogang become the most valued Chinese contemporary artist with a record in April 2011 at Sotheby’s his earlier work Forever lasting love reached 9.000.000$. Zhang’s artworks focus on the relationship with past, memory and history. The artist has always placed an emphasis on the existence of history and memory in the present. In his works, history exists in the present, there is no way to erase it, and it is continuously being revised. It is impossible to not involve history; our current perception is too derived from our memories. Zhang has always been a traditional artist, who expresses man’s experiences and emotions through his paintings. Those scintillating spots, scars and lines on his canvases reveal the references to history and the release of emotions. Such traditional expression and the insistence on it bring us back to the belief in and worship of painting’s narrative. His effort is to re-emphasize the power of emotion and feeling over the “super-flat” and “cool.” More recent works by Zhang Xiaogang of the Amnesia and Remembrance series deal with the workings of memory. The artist is interested in how memory can be selective and often inaccurate. Here the artist draws upon elements of his very early work prior to 1993, light bulbs, and open books with writing, pens etc.

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Other and former works: