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Thursday 6 February

Zhang Xiaogang: The Ghosts of Memory

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, it’s time to talk about Zhang Xiaogang, born in 1958, this artist who probably makes you think you’re looking at family photographs retouched by a melancholic ghost. But make no mistake, for behind these smooth faces and empty gazes lies one of contemporary art’s deepest reflections on collective memory and individual identity.

When Zhang paints his portraits from the “Bloodline” series, it’s as if he’s inviting us to a séance where the specters of China’s communist past come to haunt the present. These faces, frozen in an unsettling expression of neutrality, strangely remind us of official photographs from the Maoist era, where each individual had to project the perfect image of the model citizen. But Zhang goes far beyond simple political critique. He draws directly from Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on the aura of images and their capacity to embody collective memory. Benjamin, in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, spoke of this mysterious quality that allows an image to transcend its simple materiality to become the vessel of shared memory. Zhang, by reproducing these family portraits with their deliberate imperfections, their mysterious stains, and their red lines connecting the characters, creates precisely what Benjamin called “dialectical images” – images that crystallize the tension between past and present.

These portraits are disturbingly uniform, as if an entire generation had been cast from the same mold. The pale, almost translucent faces seem to emerge from a fog of collective memory. And yet, look carefully: each face bears a small mark, an imperfection, like a crack in the facade of uniformity. This is where Zhang’s genius lies. He doesn’t simply document an era, he reveals its flaws, the invisible scars that mark each individual.

Maurice Halbwachs’ philosophy on collective memory finds a striking illustration here. According to Halbwachs, our personal memories are always embedded in a broader social framework. Zhang materializes this theory by creating portraits that are both deeply personal and inevitably collective. The red lines that cross his paintings, like blood threads connecting the characters, are not just a simple family metaphor – they represent the invisible bonds that unite each individual to their country’s collective history.

Take for example his work “Bloodline: Big Family No. 3” from 1995. At first glance, it’s an ordinary family portrait: father, mother, child, all wearing similar uniforms, all bearing the same distant gaze. But look more carefully: the faces are marked with pinkish stains, like burns or stigmata. These marks are not technical flaws, but symbolic scars, traces left by history on the very skin of its subjects. Zhang forces us to see what we might prefer to ignore: how collective history inscribes itself in the very flesh of the individual.

Zhang doesn’t just paint portraits, he creates visual stratifications where each layer of paint corresponds to a layer of memory. The dominant gray in his canvases isn’t chosen randomly – it’s the very color of ambiguity, of the in-between, of those blurred zones between remembrance and forgetting. The faces he paints seem to float in an indeterminate space, neither fully present nor completely absent, like ghosts that refuse to disappear but can no longer fully manifest themselves.

Zhang’s approach is all the more interesting as it transcends simple political criticism to reach a universal dimension. His portraits don’t just speak about China or communism – they tell us about how every society attempts to format its members, about the permanent tension between the individual and the collective, about those invisible marks that History leaves on each of us.

Look at how he treats light in his paintings. These strange glows that seem to emanate from nowhere, these halos that sometimes surround faces, are not mere pictorial effects. They evoke those moments of lucidity when memory suddenly pierces the veil of forgetfulness, when the past emerges with blinding clarity in the present. It’s as if Zhang were telling us that truth doesn’t reside in the clarity of memory, but in its shadows, in what resists both erasure and full light.

The artist uses a deliberately restricted palette, dominated by grays and blacks, occasionally punctuated with touches of red – the color of blood, of course, but also that of the Cultural Revolution. This chromatic choice isn’t merely aesthetic, it’s deeply political. By draining his portraits of their color, Zhang shows us how ideology can empty individuals of their vitality while leaving indelible traces.

In his more recent works, Zhang has begun to introduce everyday objects – light bulbs, telephone wires, old radio sets. These objects aren’t simple accessories; they are silent witnesses to history, relics of an era when modernity was slowly infiltrating Chinese society. Each object carries within it a memorial charge, like those old family photographs we carefully preserve without quite remembering who they represent.

Zhang creates images that function simultaneously on multiple levels. On a personal level, they are intimate portraits, charged with contained emotion. On a social level, they document an era and its traumas. On a philosophical level, they question the very nature of memory and identity. And on an artistic level, they reinvent the portrait genre by infusing it with a spectral dimension that makes them unforgettable.

What’s particularly remarkable in Zhang’s work is his way of treating time. His portraits aren’t fixed in a precise moment – they seem to exist in a temporal in-between, between past and present, between memory and forgetting. This approach echoes Henri Bergson’s conception of time, for whom duration isn’t a succession of distinct moments but a continuous flow where past and present inextricably blend. The faces painted by Zhang perfectly embody this conception: they are simultaneously here and elsewhere, present and absent, contemporary and historical.

Zhang’s pictorial technique is just as fascinating as his subject matter. His way of working the canvas surface, applying multiple layers of paint which he then meticulously smooths, creates a paradoxical depth effect. The faces seem to emerge from the canvas while remaining imprisoned within it, like memories that surface in consciousness without ever fully revealing themselves. This tension between surface and depth, between what is shown and what is hidden, constitutes one of the artist’s most recognizable visual signatures.

Zhang doesn’t just paint portraits, he creates visual enigmas that force us to question our own relationship with memory and history. His paintings are like mirrors that reflect back to us not our own image, but that of a humanity marked by history’s great upheavals. And perhaps this is where their greatest strength lies: in their ability to make us see, beyond individual faces, the collective face of an era and its invisible scars.

Zhang Xiaogang’s art is a deep meditation on how history inscribes itself in bodies and faces, how it shapes individuals while transcending them. His portraits are not simply representations of people, but windows opened onto the complexity of collective and individual memory. In a world where images have become omnipresent but often emptied of meaning, his work reminds us that certain images still have the power to haunt us, to question us, and perhaps even to transform us.

But make no mistake, the subtlety with which Zhang treats these complex themes takes nothing away from their power. On the contrary, it’s precisely in this restraint, in this economy of means, that his strength lies. Take for example his “Green Wall” series, where he paints domestic interiors of an almost oppressive banality. The walls, painted green halfway up according to Maoist-era fashion, become under his brush full actors in the silent drama being played out. These empty spaces, these rooms inhabited only by a few everyday objects – a chair, a light bulb hanging from the ceiling, a radio set – are charged with a ghostly presence that speaks to us of absence, loss, disappearance.

The artist particularly excels in his treatment of seemingly insignificant details. A slight asymmetry in a face, an electrical wire crossing the canvas improbably, a spot of light that seems to float in space – each of these elements carries meaning, contributing to create a work that functions as a true system of signs. This attention to detail isn’t gratuitous: it participates in a sophisticated visual strategy aimed at making us see beyond the surface of things.

In his recent sculptures, Zhang pushes this exploration of memory and identity even further. By transforming everyday objects – books, pens, bottles – into bronze, he gives them a monumental dimension that tears them from their banality to make them relics of a bygone era. These objects, frozen in metal, become silent witnesses to a history that continues to haunt the present.

What strikes one in the evolution of Zhang’s work is his consistency in exploring these themes while constantly renewing his plastic language. If his early portraits from the “Bloodline” series were characterized by an almost clinical approach, his more recent works show greater freedom in pictorial treatment, without losing any of their evocative power. The red lines that connected characters in his early paintings have given way to more subtle but equally significant connections.

Zhang’s influence on contemporary Chinese art is considerable, but his importance extends far beyond his country’s borders. By creating works that speak simultaneously of the intimate and the collective, the personal and the political, he has developed a visual language that resonates well beyond its original context. His portraits are not simply documents of a specific period in Chinese history – they are universal meditations on how history marks individuals, how memory shapes our identity, and how art can serve as a witness to these complex processes.

In a world where images have become omnipresent but often superficial, where collective memory is constantly threatened by the acceleration of time and the multiplication of information, Zhang’s work reminds us of the importance of contemplation, reflection, and depth. His works invite us to slow down, to look carefully, to question our own relationship with history and memory.

Zhang Xiaogang has created a body of work that defies simple categories. Is it political art? Conceptual art? Contemporary portraiture? It is all of these things, and much more. It is art that speaks to us about the human condition in all its complexity, that explores the shadows of our collective history while reminding us of our own vulnerability in the face of historical forces.

What makes Zhang Xiaogang great is that he transforms deeply personal experiences into a universal reflection on the nature of memory and identity. His portraits are not simply images of people, they are mirrors in which we can all recognize ourselves, windows opened onto the complexity of our relationship with the past, present, and future.

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