ZhaoGang

Pérez Art Museum Miami

English

Zhao Gang (b. 1961, Beijing) is a key figure in the development of Chinese contemporary art. The youngest member of the Stars Group—China’s first modern art movement—Gang left China in 1983 to study, live, and work in Maastricht, the Netherlands, and New York. After returning to China 24 years later, in 2007, Gang developed a dynamic, provocative painting practice that freely combines Western and Eastern influences while reflecting on the profound changes affecting his native country. Before Gang left, there was no such thing as “Chinese contemporary art.” By the time he returned, globalization had ushered in not just multiple styles and forms of art, but also an entire art economy.

Zhao Gang: History Painting is made up of 14 paintings that bring together the radically multicultural aspects of Gang’s art and identity. Though the artist is Chinese and American, he is considered (and considers himself) an insider’s outsider in both cultures. As both native and newcomer, Gang has developed a darkly ironic, often deliberately crude approach to depicting Chinese history. His paintings elide centuries-old tropes with images from the Cultural Revolution, visuals drawn from memories of his childhood, and views of China as an economic and cultural powerhouse in the new millennium.

In both the East and West, painting has long been used as a way to relay important stories. In China, ink painting reached heights of spectacular realism in the work of seventh-century artist Wu Daozi. In the West, Renaissance polymath Leon Battista Alberti inaugurated the idea of “history painting”—multi-figure works derived chiefly from biblical, classical, or allegorical sources—as the noblest form of all the plastic arts. For centuries Alberti’s ideal was considered the pinnacle of artistic achievement in the West. By the end of the 19th century artists schooled in European aesthetics began to expunge painting of narrative in favor of radical experiments in style, expression, and abstraction.

Zhao Gang: History Painting

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Starting at the end of the 20th century key international artists embraced narrative again as a way of critically channeling the contemporary conditions of multiculturalism, heterogeneity, and globalization. Gang is such an artist, but with a twist. A descendant of the Manchus, a once nomadic minority that overtook and ruled China for decades, Gang has long approached Chinese identity as a construction that is both hereditary and biographical—a concept he has pictured stylistically and thematically throughout his oeuvre. As a painter he has taken it upon himself to chart a subjective, at times caustic history of his native land. In the process he has become alert not just to his own personal, national, and supranational histories, but also to the present situation of painting as a medium.

A profoundly Chinese artist who is also an American citizen, Gang studied, worked, got married, and had children during his lengthy sojourn in the West. Notably, he quit making art for a short period, leaving the art world behind to become a banker—a move he later sarcastically recast as performance art. During that period he lived in Maastricht, Paris, and Poughkeepsie before settling in New York City. By the time he returned to painting in 1999, China had undergone profound changes brought about by the Anti-Spiritual-Pollution Campaign of 1983, the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989, and the much larger social upheaval that followed the nation’s shift to a market economy. As a response, Gang’s painting took on a changeling crudeness, not unlike the humor and abjectness seen in Martin Kippenberger’s portrayals of a spiritually beleaguered Germany during the 1980s and ’90s.

Since returning to Beijing—the painter has studios in China’s capital and in Taipei—Gang has successfully staked out a wary critical position between competing cultures. He is often referred to as one of the only members of his generation who truly understands both East and West. Over the last 12 years he has developed a practice that consistently, if cheekily reevaluates multiple artistic legacies. The painter’s motorcycle-riding, hard-living persona has also helped burnish his reputation as a rebel (among his nicknames in China is “Gangsta Zhao”). Gang’s brashness can also be chalked up to geopolitical savvy. Like certain American Abstract Expressionists after WWII, the artist-émigré-turned-cosmopolitan understands a fundamental fact: art of economically dominant powers (namely, China and the United States) invariably exercise a disproportionate impact on the era’s overall culture.

An awareness of this shifting artistic context has led Gang to a thorough review of painting both past and present. To this end, the work collected in Zhao Gang: History Painting features an eclectic mix of landscapes, still-lifes, genre paintings, interiors, and two group portraits. Characteristically, Gang’s pictures use forceful color and expressionistic shorthand to depict certain historical details he researches exhaustively. Rather than render them naturalistically, the artist typically opts for a combination of smooth paint handling and rough-hewn application. If some pictures resemble reworkings of the mass imagery of early Pop art, others invoke the sulfurous distortions of Francis Bacon’s warped heads and bodies.

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The giant painting Cocksucker Blues (2014–15)—raunchily titled after the unreleased Robert Frank documentary of the Rolling Stones’ 1972 tour of America—was painted after Gang visited the villages of 21 intellectuals victimized by Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The canvas constitutes a massive group portrait of China’s lost generation against a Tiepolo sky taken from a photograph of the Yangtze River Delta. Like Gang, many of these figures were educated abroad in top European and American universities and subsequently returned to China. Unlike Gang, they were harassed, humiliated, imprisoned, tortured, and killed. But for a twist of historical fate, he could have easily been one of them.

Like Andy Warhol’s car crashes and electric chair series, Gang’s canvases belong to the ever-expanding genre of “disaster paintings.” If most of his paintings are photo-based compositions that entertain specific facts surrounding a particular catastrophe, they do so often by recording banal details and finding sly power in triviality. Consider, for instance, Gang’s large painting of a standing Buddha, which the artist has selected to irreligiously hang upside down in this exhibition. Done in pink and white against a black background, the circular base supporting the outline of Defigured Buddha (2015) suggests the figure has been blown up from a photo of a tourist tchotchke, while its hands conventionally signal a clichéd representation of charity and compassion.

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Yet Gang’s emphasis on these details does not obscure his own inspirations or the forgotten identities of his human subjects. Among his most revealing works is Revolution Ballet (2007), a painting of a winsome female dancer. Dressed as a soldier performing the Mao-era ballet The Red Detachment of Women—the overlain Chinese characters depict a musical score—the figure embodies one of the few alluring female visuals to be encountered in public in China during the Cultural Revolution. Gang’s boyhood memory of the popular image sketches a provocative portrait of the artist as a young Communist: he saw the reproduction and was struck with a wave of sexual anxiety.

Elsewhere, a Piet Mondrian–like black, red, gray, and white canvas prosaically titled A Corridor of the Classroom (2014) captures what’s left of the elite private school that was once the educational cradle of the intellectuals Gang memorializes in his group portrait. Painted after a series of black-and-white photographs Gang took himself, the school’s interior courtyard is rendered in what Philip Tinari has called the “colors of workaday brushwork and imperial edict.”1 Arranged vertically with pedagogically inspired poise, the artist’s red and black lines take the form of tonal keys in a personalized account of China’s haunted intellectual history.

The Smoker (2018) depicts an earlier view of Chinese life as lived during the age of Western Imperialism. The painting portrays the use of opium, which reached epidemic levels in China during the Opium Wars, and describes a culture beset by addiction and cultural subjugation—the exact opposite

of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s current “China Dream” of national rejuvenation. These and other Gang pictures—several are contained in an installation arrayed inside the show itself that mimics the 1980s Beijing phenomenon of experimental “apartment art”—propose a fundamentally oppositional role for painting in China today: that of grudging memory keeper amid a global whirlwind of political, economic, and cultural change.

At PAMM, Gang’s exhibition—as well as his exhibition within the exhibition—materializes the challenges faced by artists of his generation while drawing parallels between instances of censorship in both the East and West. Like Kippenberger, Gang is far too much of a provocateur to resemble anyone’s fantasy of the artist as freedom fighter. Yet his stubborn insistence to expressionistically paint his time and place during a darkening era of information blackout makes him exactly what the age demands: the artist as gadfly, an impolite blasphemer, a brazen if selective rule breaker and, ultimately, troublemaker extraordinaire.

Christian Viveros–FaunéGuest Curator

1 Li Jing, “Brash Rebel Artist An Eternal Provocateur,” China Daily USA, April 10, 2015, chinadaily.com.cn/beijing/2015-04/10/content_20418487.htm.

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Zhao Gang (b. 1961, Beijing) lives and works in Beijing. He made his artistic debut as a member of the Stars Group, one of the first avant-garde artist groups to open the era of contemporary art in China. He has had solo exhibitions at Suzhou Museum; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; Today Art Museum, Beijing; Hong Kong Art Center; Asian American Arts Center, New York; and Triumph Art Space, Beijing. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Long Museum (West Bund), Shanghai; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Beijing Minsheng Art Museum; China Contemporary Art Institute, Beijing; Guangzhou Triennial; Yokohama Triennial; and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut.

Biography

Images

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Revolution Ballet, 2007. Oil on canvas. 61 x 61 3/16 inches.Courtesy the artist and Long March Space, Beijing

Mao Coin, 2006. Oil on canvas. 37 x 26 inches. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin/Cologne

There Is An America, 2007. Oil on canvas. 78 3/4 x 118 1/8 inches.Pizzuti Collection

Cocksucker Blues, 2014–15. Oil on canvas. 157 1/2 x 236 1/4 inches. Courtesy the artist and Long March Space, Beijing

A Corridor of the Classroom, 2014. Oil on canvas. 78 3/4 x 70 7/8 inches. Frank F. Yang Art and Education Foundation

Untitled Landscape, 2006. Oil on canvas. 35 7/16 x 47 1/4 inches. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin/Cologne

The Smoker, 2018. Oil on canvas. 42 x 65 inches. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstien

Zhao Gang: History PaintingMay 24, 2019—January 5, 2020

Zhao Gangb. 1961, Beijing; lives in Beijing

1103 Biscayne Blvd., Miami, FL 33132305 375 3000 | info@pamm.org | pamm.org

Accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) is sponsored in part by the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs, and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture. Support is provided by the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners. Additional support is provided by the City of Miami and the Miami OMNI Community Redevelopment Agency (OMNI CRA). Pérez Art Museum Miami is an accessible facility. All contents ©Pérez Art Museum Miami 2019. All rights reserved.

All works are oil on canvas

Untitled, 199759 13/16 x 59 13/16Courtesy the artist andGalerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin/Cologne

Mao Coin, 200637 x 26 inchesCourtesy the artist andGalerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin/Cologne

Untitled Landscape, 200635 7/16 x 47 1/4 inchesCourtesy the artist andGalerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin/Cologne

Revolution Ballet, 200761 x 61 3/16 inchesCourtesy the artist andLong March Space, Beijing

The Good Times, 200761 x 51 3/16 inchesCollection of the artist,courtesy Tilton Gallery, New York

There Is An America, 200778 3/4 x 118 1/8 inchesPizzuti Collection

Utopia Intention, 201170 1/2 x 104 3/4 inchesWei and Jon Christianson

A Corridor of the Classroom, 201478 3/4 x 70 7/8 inchesFrank F. Yang Art andEducation Foundation

Between Heaven and Earth, 2014–1547 1/4 x 157 1/2 inchesPrivate collection, New York,courtesy Sean Kelly, New York

Cocksucker Blues, 2014–15157 1/2 x 236 1/4 inchesCourtesy the artist andLong March Space, Beijing

Defigured Buddha, 2015102 3/8 x 86 5/8 inchesCourtesy the artist andLong March Space, Beijing

Modern Landscape, 201578 3/4 x 70 7/8 inchesYang Bin Collection

Basket of Assholes, 201778 3/4 x 63 inchesCourtesy the artist andLong March Space, Beijing

The Smoker, 2018 42 x 65 inchesCourtesy the artist andGreene Naftali, New York

Zhao Gang: History Painting is organized by Guest Curator Christian Viveros-Fauné and coordinated at Pérez Art Museum Miami by Assistant Curator Jennifer Inacio. This exhibition is presented with lead individual support from Ann Blackwell and Cornelius Bond. Additional support from Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin/Cologne and Long March Space, Beijing, together with Greene Naftali, New York is gratefully acknowledged.