Zhang Xiaogang - China Avant-Garde: The Farber Collection London Friday, October 12, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Acquired directly from the artist

  • Catalogue Essay

    The largest Bloodlines work ever featured at auction, the present lot by Zhang Xiaogang is part of the artist’s legendary oeuvre. Conceived during a period characterized by a deep identity crisis in China following the bloody events of Tiananmen Square in 1989, this iconic series has come to embody a certain generational spirit of Chinese avant-garde art.

    The Bloodlines works serve as metaphors for the legacy of China’s Maoist era; they are also Zhang’s way of expressing the power of transmission from one generation to the next. The biological importance of family genetics is demonstrated through genetic transmission; more intangible is the inter-generational transmission of cultural and social identity. The red bloodlines are the artist’s concrete expression of family ties and, more literally, genetic carriers. Hereditary strengths and defects lurk in the background, occasionally indicated by clues such as the glasses worn by the two figures in this painting.

    “The year was 1993. I was at my parents' house and was looking through their old pictures. That was when I got my inspiration and began thinking about the Bloodline series. I felt that through a family, especially a Chinese family. These old photographs reflected greater society. We all live in one big family. This is different with Western families. Chinese people put a huge emphasis on the family. Family relations include those of blood, those who are your kin, at the same time in society, in your job, you cannot leave these family, like relations. That left a deep impression on me. So I hope that from drawing family photographs, it can reflect my understanding of life. It also incorporates the fact that we live in a society that's very contradictory. I wanted to express this relationship between the individual and society. This kind of relationship is like a son who disobeys his father, yet unable to leave his family behind. It's a complicated relationship.” (X. Zhang in an interview with Anjali Rao. Talk Asia, CNN, July 19, 2007)

  • Artist Biography

    Zhang Xiaogang

    Chinese • 1958

    Relying on memory and inspired by family portraits from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Zhang Xiaogang creates surreal, subtle artworks that explore the notion of identity in relation to the Chinese culture of collectivism. Using a muted, greyscale palette, Xiaogang repeatedly depicts a series of unnervingly similar figures, often dressed in identical Mao suits, to create an endless genealogy of imagined forebears and progenitors. Their somber, melancholy gazes are interrupted only by thin red bloodlines intimating familial links as well as occasional pale splotches of color resembling birthmarks.

    Xiaogang investigates how to express individual histories within the strict confines of a formula. His sitters, while appearing muted and compliant, are given physical exaggerations: oversized heads, tiny hands and long noses. These distortions imply stifled emotions and give a complex psychological dimension to the artist's work.

    View More Works

507

Bloodline Series

2005
Oil on canvas.
78 1/2 x 102 1/2 in. (199.4 x 260.4 cm).
Signed “Zhang Xiaogang [in Chinese] 2005” lower right.

Estimate
£500,000 - 700,000 

Sold for £804,000

China Avant-Garde: The Farber Collection

The Farber Collection
13 October 2007, 7pm
London