The China Project

248 demise. The exhibition included 186 artists and 293 art works across a range of mediums, such as painting, sculpture, installation, performance and photography. In April, Zhang’s first solo exhibition (featuring his ‘Lost dreams’ series) was held at the exhibition hall of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. That same month, pro-democracy student demonstrations began, and on 4 June the historical events at Tiananmen Square took place, abruptly terminating the era of liberal reform. The 1990s proved to be a highly significant period of artistic breakthroughs for Zhang. In 1992, he travelled to Germany for three months, where he encountered firsthand many of the Western art works he had admired through art books and journals. Although he returned filled with enthusiasm for the paintings of German artist Gerhard Richter (which he encountered at Kassel’s Documenta 9) and surrealist René Magritte, Zhang was disappointed with what he thought was the stale air of wealth and opportunity of the West’s Avant-garde. He returned with a greater sense of his own identity as a Chinese artist, determined to explore and revitalise his own history and recent past. Initially Zhang confronted history by creating a group of powerful paintings of Tiananmen Square in 1993; Tiananmen Square was the site of many significant events from the ‘hopeful rallies from the early Mao era, hysterical Red Guard meetings and the mass demonstrations of grief after the death of Premier Zhou Enlai’, as well as the massacres of 1989. 10 However, the real breakthrough occurred when he encountered old family photographs — highly significant items in a culture that had witnessed the destruction of many precious memories. Specifically, Zhang was inspired by a previously unseen photograph of his mother as a serene and attractive young woman, very different from the troubled and ill mother he recalled. He also drew on ubiquitous charcoal drawings sold on the street. The result was his ‘Bloodline: The big family’ series, a group of works which ‘distilled’ the troubling legacies and heritage of the Cultural Revolution. He remembers: I felt very excited, as if a door had opened. I could see a way to paint the contradictions between the individual and the collective and it was from this that I started really to paint. There’s a complex relationship between the state and the people that I could express by using the Cultural Revolution. China is like a family, a big family. Everyone has to rely on each other and to confront each other. This was the issue I wanted to give attention to and, gradually, it became less and less linked to the Cultural Revolution and more to people’s states of mind. 11 above Zhang Xiaogang in Chongqing with one of his Tian’anmen works, 1993 / Courtesy: The artist Zhang Xiaogang in the Kunming studio of Mao Xuhui, with his portraits of friends from the South West Art Group, including Portrait in yellow and Portrait in red , both 1993 / Courtesy: The artist right The artist working on a painting from ‘Bloodline: The big family’ series in his studio at Chongqing, Sichuan Province, 1996 / Courtesy: The artist opposite Father and daughter 1999 Oil on canvas / 100 x 80cm / Collection: The artist