The China Project

20 come to understand something of the agonizing paradoxes that lay at the centre of this protracted human disaster. 13 This body of photographs survived due to Li Zhensheng’s care of his negatives and prints, which he carefully hid until he was ready to reveal what he had witnessed. This devastating period was a profound experience for Chinese people. As Xu Bing has noted: . . . if you want to probe deeply into the underpinnings of contemporary Chinese art, you have to consider the influence of the Cultural Revolution on my generation because it was an entirely unique experience. 14 Zhang Xiaogang has described his experience of the Cultural Revolution as ‘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’. 15 Zhang was born in 1958, so was eight years old when the Cultural Revolution began and eighteen when it ended. Born in Kunming in the southern province of Yunnan, Zhang and his family moved north to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, in 1964. He spent much of his childhood there during the Cultural Revolution as traditional family structures were eroded and individual liberties removed, often with the repercussions of denunciation, imprisonment or being banished to the countryside for ‘re-education’. In 1972, when Zhang was 14, he was sent to Yunnan Province to learn farming after being separated from his parents; they had both been sent to prison that year, for a three-year stretch, on political grounds. At 19, at the end of the Cultural Revolution, he was accepted into the oil painting department at the prestigious Sichuan Academy of Fine Art, one of the three leading art academies in China. The exhibition ‘Zhang Xiaogang: Shadows in the Soul’ consists of works that date from 1982 to 2008, and includes two early suites of drawings. The first is a set of 14 drawings with the common title ‘Guishan’ 1982, and the second is a set of 16 drawings from 1984 titled ‘Ghost between black and white’. On looking closely at these works, it becomes clear that for Zhang, even from these early days, the significance of psychological states and the complex functions of memory underpin his entire body of work. In the Guishan drawings, the landscape surrounding this small village is sketched in bold, harsh lines, giving it a lunar appearance, with twisted, leafless vegetation emerging from a stony landscape populated by goats and sheep. These external views are suggestive of internal ruminations. The drawings in the ‘Ghost between black and white’ series seem to be rooted in dark psychological visions; internal tensions are drawn in eerie, peopled landscapes. In the works of the late 1980s and early 1990s, a sense of melancholy and despair seems to prevail. Zhang has stated that ‘Ghost between black and white’ drew heavily on his own experience of fear, loneliness and depression while he was hospitalised during a particularly difficult period in his life from 1982 to 1985. However, even later images of recognisable places, such as Tian’anmen no.2 1993, are barren and stark. In many of these paintings, historical facts have been transformed into expressions of a psychological condition. In his continuing series ‘Bloodlines: The big family’ — paintings made primarily in the decade of 1993–2003 — Zhang scrutinised the political implications of the ‘revolutionary family’ on traditional family life. During the 1990s, Zhang had left the provincial town of Chengdu and relocated to Beijing. He had also travelled overseas and seen the work of many Western artists he had admired and read about. Photography played an important part in the conception of these works, underlined by the fact that many family photographs were lost and often deliberately destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Of these works Zhang has said: After all, the family is a collective concept and my generation has a particular relationship with the idea of family and it is closely tied to our collective memories. Because of this, the subject of my work, beginning in 2000, began to reflect the perplexing relationships that develop between people and the turbulent lives they lead. This is what I am most interested in. Nevertheless, my emphasis and interest still lies in how this society influences the individual’s personality and how it changes human nature. 16 Zhang’s practice is anchored in a humanist ethic, defined in the Chinese context as a move to tackle ‘cultural enlightenment, political criticism and intellectual emancipation’. Historian Huang Zhuan elaborates on this idea: Chinese humanism of the 1980s had a critical historic and realistic dimension: it was both an attack on feudal China’s fifty centuries of cultural repression and on the ideological dogma of post-1950s socialism. (These two widely different attacks were frequently mistaken, one for the other, in the mid-1980s.) The former was concerned with transforming opposite Li Zhensheng / China b.1940 Reading of ‘A letter to peasants from the Central Committee of the Communist Party’, Harbin, 11 October 1968 1968 (from ‘Red-colour news soldier’) (portfolio of 9 photographs) 1964–76, printed 2008 Digital print / 30 x 30cm / The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 2008 with funds from Michael Simcha Baevski through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Li Zhensheng, Contact Press Images above Zhang Xiaogang / China b.1958 Guishan no.11: Entrance of a village 1982 Ink / 19.6 x 26.6 cm / Collection: The artist