Xiaogang Zhang

Born 1958 Kunming, China.
Lives and works in Beijing, China.

«Born under the full force of Cultural Revolution, Zhang Xiaogang has seen his work soar to the top of the international art market in the past few years. He is undoubtedly the best known and most collected artist of his generation. But, underlying this work is a somber, almost pessimistic view of life in contemporary China, quite the opposite of the ebullient market this artist in now experiencing. Graduating from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 1982, Zhang Xiaogang remained in Yunnan Province until moving to Beijing in 1990. Early in his career, he floundered, unsure of how to incorporate western realistic painting taught in the academy with his more personal concerns. But, by 1989, when he was included in the landmark "China/Avant-Garde" exibition at the National Gallery of Art in Beijing, he had begun developing his own vocabulary based on family photographs, traditional chinese portrait painting and the surrealistic works of Rene Magritte. His "Bloodline" series, begun in 1993 and continuing to the present, depict nearly emotionless nuclear families painted monochromatically, except for a splash of color across the face of single child or a bright red line accenting the surface of the canvas.» Barbara Pollack