Zhang Xiaogang’s paintings engage with the notion of identity within the Chinese culture of collectivism. Basing his work around the concept of ‘family’ –immediate, extended, and societal – Zhang’s portraits depict an endless genealogy of imagined forebears and progenitors, each unnervingly similar and distinguished by minute difference.

Zhang Xiaogang is very much a product of the Chinese art academy system, and out of this heritage he has developed an iconography and identified a special sensibility that in many ways define this era. Because Zhang's footing is within the academy system, therefore the system may also claim credit for his success. So it follows that Zhang should be looked upon as a paradigmatic success model of the Chinese art world.

Bloodline and Amnesia and Memory, the two series that have made Zhang's reputation in the 1990s, focus on portraiture, a subject underlined by concerns around the visual portrayal of the Chinese figure, especially as it involves the adaptation of western classical painting technique to local needs.Often painted in black and white, Zhang’s portraits translate the language of photography into paint. Drawing from the generic quality of formal photo studio poses and greyscale palette, Zhang’s figures are nameless and timeless: a series of individual histories represented within the strict confines of formula. The occasional splotches of colour which interrupt his images create aberrant demarcations, reminiscent of birth marks, aged film, social stigma, or a lingering sense of the sitter’s self assertion.

Incorporating the aesthetic of traditional Chinese charcoal drawing, Zhang’s style wavers between the exaggeration of animation and stoic flatness. Muted and compliant, Zhang’s extended family convey individual identity through their unalterable physical features: too big heads, tiny hands, long noses, and subtle alterations in hairstyle give clues to intimate characteristics and stifled emotions. These dream-like distortions give a complex psychological dimension to Zhang’s work, heightening the tension of regulated claustrophobia, and initiating suggestive narrative readings.

Conclusions:

Zhang Xiaogang's art has become a canon of contemporary Chinese oil painting, and its merits depend very much on the fact that he has found new solutions to harnessing western classical academic technique (a standard in Chinese academies) to turn it into an indigenous artistic language.