The China Project

247 Zhang XiAOgang: Shadows in the Soul by the ghosts of his past and particularly by memories of his mother’s illness, he began his ‘The ghost between black and white’ series, a group of surrealist-inspired encounters involving phantoms. In each of these 16 works, the ghosts (wearing the white sheets of his hospital bed) face an unresolved choice, poised between life and death. Zhang recalls: At that time, my inspiration primarily came from the private feelings I had at the hospital. When I lay on the white bed, on the white bed sheet, I saw many ghost-like patients comforting each other in the crammed hospital wards. When night dawned, groaning sounds rose above the hospital and some of the withering bodies around had gone to waste or were drifting on the brink of death: these deeply stirred my feelings. They were so close to my then life experiences and lonely miserable soul. 7 His paintings of this period, many of them still lifes, display a sombre palette and convoluted forms. Zhang began to emerge from his period of despair as 1985 ushered in a time of utopianism and experimentation in China. The Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign was superseded by a series of liberal reforms, and many recently-graduated artists, who were born in the mid to late 1950s, contributed to a period of intellectual, artistic and philosophical flowering known retrospectively as the ’85 New Wave. Looking back, Zhang has said: ’85 was a time of innocence, and youth like us, 24 or 25 years old at the time, had a very strong intellectual thirst. But our works and ideas weren’t accepted by society. Our lifestyles were very alternative. Sometimes what we were doing didn’t feel artistic — it felt almost like we were participating in a campaign or a movement. But that was in the later stages. The impression that the early stages of ’85 gives me is a group of young people wanting to go down the ‘other’ path, and this is purely to do with the opening up [under Deng Xiaoping] and liberation [of thought] that occurred in this country. They decided to take another path and they didn’t have anything — no money, nothing — but they carried on. They believed in a different kind of culture; it was very naïve . . . 1985 was a very interesting time; it deserves a longer discussion. 8 In 1986, Zhang formed the South West Art Group with a number of contemporaries — Mao Xuhui, Pan Dehai and Ye Yongqing; they advocated ‘an anti-urban pastoralism or regionalism, along with the exploration of individual desire, which, they argue[d], ha[d] been suppressed by collectivist rationalisation’. 9 This group, one of more than 80 that emerged during this period, received attention from critics Gao Minglu and Li Xianting for the self-funded exhibitions they organised, which have since become seminal to the history of the emerging Chinese Avant-garde. In 1988, Zhang would participate in the China Modern Art Forum at Huangshan. Later that same year, he was appointed an instructor in the education department of the Sichuan Academy, and he married his first wife Tang Lei, with whom he had a daughter, Huan Huan (born in 1994). Zhang’s work from this period continued to focus on themes of death and rebirth. Many were set in an enclosed space, featuring allegorical symbols that reappear in his work — skulls, floating broken limbs, playing cards and candles. He also began to incorporate pieces of cloth and paper into his compositions, and Reincarnation 1989 is an example. The New Wave period culminated in the 1989 ‘China/Avant-Garde’ exhibition, in which Zhang participated and which opened on 5 February at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing. Organised by Gao Minglu and Li Xianting, it was the first national avant-garde exhibition in China and was widely regarded as emblematic of both the movement and its opposite Duplicated space no.2 1990 Oil on paper / 50 x 40cm / Collection: The artist above The ghost between black and white no.8: Farewell – a ghost wanders by the River Styx 1984 Pencil / 19 x 13.8cm / Collection: The artist An early portrait of the artist’s mother, Qiu Ailan / Courtesy: The artist