A Chinese painter's new struggle: to meet demand
By DAVID BARBOZA (The New York Times)
Updated: 2005-09-01 09:42

He became part of a group of avant-garde painters who came to prominence in the 1980's. But after 1989, many of these artists went underground or abroad.

Mr. Zhang's works were not the most controversial then, but like others they were seen as breaking sharply with tradition. As a result they were often barred from being shown in Chinese galleries and were mostly acquired by foreigners.

He now says it took him 10 years to find his own style, and that along the way he battled depression and alcoholism. For six years, he says, he painted almost exclusively about death.

"I didn't feel any hope," he said of this period. "I couldn't find my place in society."

The turning point came in 1992, he said, as China was beginning to open up again. He began to feel that his surrealistic, symbolic works were too derivative of Western art. That year, he traveled to Germany, he said, where he saw and admired the photographlike paintings of Gerhard Richter.

But when he returned home, Mr. Zhang said, he decided to do something that would more faithfully express what he calls "the Chinese emotion." Then he came across some old family photographs.

"I thought, 'This is good,' " he said. "I want to show the family, the connections between people."

But in his portraits, Mr. Zhang has written, he seeks "to create false photographs," to hint at the turbulence and suppressed emotion below the surface of formal studio portraits.

In addition to studying his parents' old photographs, he said, he also paged through old books and magazines, and visited antiques shops. Even some friends began offering him old photographs.

In 1993, his first family portraits - black-and-white oils with occasional flashes of color - became the beginning of his "Bloodline" series.

It is a series that over the years has evolved from slightly surreal portraits of family members, often dressed in the Mao jackets that were standard in the 1960's and 70's, to softer-toned, almost ethereal figures.

Over time, the faces have become increasingly alike, and now all the people in a particular family portrait - male and female - have the same features. They are a single person, he says, a composite drawn from images of his mother and his own imagination.

"I want everyone to be the same," he says. "During one period in China, all families were considered virtually the same family." His parents are still unaware of their roles in his paintings, he said.

"I rarely talk to them about art," he said. "They don't really understand this. They don't ask anything about it. They care more about my health. My mother will ask, 'How are you feeling?' "

Until 1997, Mr. Zhang said, exhibition spaces in China always told him that they could not get government approval to show his works.

That's no longer a problem. State-controlled galleries are eager to show his works, which have won critical acclaim here and abroad.

"He's now one of the most important figures from the post-89 group," said Vinci Chan, a specialist in Asian contemporary art at Christie's auction house in Taiwan. "This is an important transition group. Most of these guys broke the rules. Before them, there was really only traditional work."

In 1999, Mr. Zhang moved from Kunming, in the south, to Beijing because, he said, this is the country's cultural center. And he now lives here with his longtime girlfriend.

He likes to talk about his daughter, now 11, from a marriage that ended in divorce, and says she has also taken to painting. Photographs of her, of friends and his works crowd his studio walls, along with announcements of gallery openings, pencil sketches and, of course, the old family portraits that have guided his painting.

Today, Mr. Zhang's studio looks like an assembly line of large-scale black-and-white portraits. He does all the painting himself, he said, without an assistant. But he admits to feeling pressure to produce to meet the demand.

"See that one over there," he said, pointing to a charcoal drawing on canvas of a group of young boys. "I sketched that over a year ago and I still haven't started painting it yet."

That demand is evident in visits to local galleries, where reproductions of Mr. Zhang's images show up on posters, postcards, book jackets, bookmarks and other objects. And he has agents in Hong Kong, Paris and New York.

Still, he denies that success has spoiled him.

"I'm lucky," he said. "The things I like to draw the market has accepted. But I won't just follow the market. If I paint something and the market doesn't like it now, maybe it'll like it some other time."

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