Zhang Xiaogang valuation
The Bloodline family portraits: identical grey faces from a Cultural Revolution photograph album.
Zhang Xiaogang was born in Kunming in 1958 and lived through the Cultural Revolution as a child; his parents were sent away for re-education.
What a work by Zhang Xiaogang is worth
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Bio
Zhang Xiaogang was born in Kunming in 1958 and lived through the Cultural Revolution as a child; his parents were sent away for re-education. After a difficult decade of expressionist work and heavy drinking, a 1992 trip to Europe and then the discovery of his family's old studio photographs produced the Bloodline series, which is what he is known for: stiff, frontal, near-identical family groups with smooth grey faces, painted in the manner of a retouched studio portrait, connected by fine red lines and marked with patches of light like a photographic flaw. He is among the most internationally recognised Chinese contemporary painters.
The Bloodline paintings are the centre of the market and the smooth, evenly finished grey surfaces are the condition issue, since any retouching, abrasion or stretcher mark shows immediately on an unmodulated ground. Works are unique and the title, date and dimensions identify a specific painting, as the compositions are deliberately similar. There is an editioned output of prints and of sculpture. Signature and date are usually on the face, lower corner, in Chinese characters and pinyin. Gallery provenance and exhibition history are the normal reference.
The Sichuan Academy, the South West Art Group and Venice
Zhang entered the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in Chongqing in 1977 and graduated in 1982, then spent three difficult years working on building sites and for a dance troupe in Kunming. In 1986 he formed the South West Art Group with Mao Xuhui, Pan Dehai and Ye Yongqing among others, and in 1989 he showed in the China/Avant-Garde exhibition at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing.
A photograph of his mother as a young woman was one of the starting points for Bloodline. Bloodline: Big Family paintings were shown in the Italian pavilion at the centenary Venice Biennale in 1995, in The Other Face: Three Chinese Artists, and in the mid-1990s he exhibited in Brazil, France, Australia, Britain and the United States.
Lin Ling, Germany and the false photographs
Zhang's mother gave her sons paper and crayons to keep them at home, and in 1975 the watercolour painter Lin Ling taught him watercolour and sketching. Early in 1976 he was sent to work on a farm under the Down to the Countryside Movement, and when he began oil painting at the Sichuan Academy in 1978 the teaching was still Revolutionary Realism, which pushed him and his fellow students towards Western philosophy and private subjects. He became an instructor in the academy's education department in 1988. In 1992 he spent three months in Germany, mostly looking at Western art in museums, and came back convinced that if he went on being an artist he had to be an artist of China; he then worked in Mao Xuhui's studio.
Mother and Son, of 1993, was the first Bloodline painting. Over the following years the figures become more blurred and put on Mao suits, and Two Comrades with Red Baby, 150 by 180 centimetres, is in the National Gallery of Australia; the Father and Daughter pictures of the 2000s are lighter grey than those of the 1990s. He has described the aim as an effect of false photographs, re-embellishing histories and lives that were already embellished, and has cited a remark by Eduardo Paolozzi, about having the right idea but the wrong means, as an influence. His paintings appear in the 2005 film Sunflower, and he has shown at Max Protetch in New York, at PaceWildenstein in 2008 and at the Queensland Art Gallery in 2009.
Best auction results
- Bloodline: Big Family No. 2 HK$98m
- Oil on canvas, 1995 · Hong Kong · 2 December 2020
- Publicly reported
- Bloodline: Big Family No. 3 HK$94.2m
- Oil on canvas, 1995 · Hong Kong · 5 April 2014
- Publicly reported
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
