The China Project

244 The artist does not speak much of this period of his life, however, it is clear that his parents were sent to a re-education camp for a period of three years while he and his brothers were largely left to care for themselves. At 14, Zhang was separated from his family and sent to be ‘retrained’ as a farmer as part of the Down to the Countryside Movement. Despite these circumstances, Zhang was determined to pursue a career as an artist. In 1975, he became a student of watercolourist Lin Ling, with whom he studied sketching and watercolour techniques: When I was 17, I told myself I wanted to be an artist . . . I felt that art was like a drug. Once you are addicted, you can’t get rid of it. 5 In 1976, Mao Zedong’s death and the imminent arrest of the infamous Gang of Four heralded the end of the Cultural Revolution. Entrance exams were reinstated for newly opened colleges and, in 1977, Zhang gained admission to the prestigious Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in Chongqing. After a ten-year hiatus from education, he entered the college as one of a group of extremely talented young artists, many of whom would later be associated with the ’85 New Wave. In 1978 he began his studies in the oil painting department. Many of Zhang’s teachers continued to favour the style of Revolutionary Realism instituted by Mao Zedong at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art in 1942. However, Zhang and his contemporaries began to turn away from the politics and ideology associated with the style and looked to the influx of Western ideas, concepts and philosophies which emphasised the individual and the self. Initially Zhang was heavily influenced by Dutch post-impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh, as well as Jean François Millet and other French landscape painters, whose work could be seen in the newly emerging art journals and in exhibitions in the nation’s capital. Zhang’s early landscape paintings, which he presented at his graduation, were based on the Aba Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, where he spent two months in 1981. Quietly introspective, their simple subject matter presented a challenge to the official style of heroic tableaux celebrating revolutionary zeal. In 1982, Zhang graduated with a Bachelor degree from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. Although his work had received support from independent art critic Li Xianting (editor of Art magazine, which would feature Zhang on the cover later that year), Zhang was not offered a teaching post as he had hoped. The same year saw the launch of the Anti- Spiritual Pollution Campaign — intended to challenge the undermining of communist ideals by Westernised humanist ideas — which would continue until 1984. The next three years (1982–85) — which he later referred to as the ‘dark era’ in his life — represented a period of great uncertainty for Zhang in which he struggled with depression, although he continued to grow and develop as an artist. He spent some time as a construction worker, and also as an art designer for the Song and Dance Troupe of Kunming. During this period he produced the series of little-known early landscape drawings called ‘Guishan’. They were completed in a small Sani ethnic village in Guizhou, frequented by artists. Through these landscapes, Zhang hoped to portray: . . . not a world that is discerned by the sensory organs, not a conceptual image that subconsciously flows but the soul’s special reaction to nature, a landscape that is both natur[al] and unnatural . . . 6 1983 was a year of intense self-examination and reflection for Zhang, which is evident in his early self portrait showing him in a very Western light. He felt increasingly unable to find a place for himself in society and he began to drink heavily. In 1984, he was hospitalised for alcohol-induced bleeding of the stomach, a dangerous and debilitating condition. Troubled above The artist pictured with Eternal love in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, 1988 / Courtesy: The artist Zhang Xiaogang, Chengdu, Sichuan Province, 1987 / Courtesy: The artist opposite Guishan no.10: A sheep and two fighting goats 1982 Ink / 19.6 x 26.6cm / Collection: The artist Guishan no.13: A fire 1982 Ink / 19.6 x 26.6cm / Collection: The artist