Oliver Stone’S Zhang Xiaogang At Christie’s Hong Kong

Wednesday 10 December 2008

In the last days, precisely on the 30th November and the 1st December, c Honk Kong was at the centre of international attention, thanks to an exceptional auction dedicated to Asian contemporary art. A sale that did not achieve great results (many lots sold below their lowest estimate), but that saw under the auctioneer’s hammer a selection from the collection of movie producer – and lover of Asian contemporary art – Oliver Stone. A prestigious collection of Chinese contemporary art, which the famous US film director started in the Nineties. Five important pieces of his collection were sold during the Asian Contemporary Art Evening and Day Sale and fetched Stone about 4.5 million dollars.
The key masterpiece at Christie’s auction was definitely “Bloodline: Big Family, No.2”, a painting executed in 1995 by Zhang Xiaogang and sold for 3,424,444 dollars, although experts had predicted at least 4 million. Very high expectations, given that Zhang Xiaogang is one of the highest quoted Chinese artists on the market.
Since 2001 there have been 140 passages of his works at auction, with a sale percentage equal to 92%. An author who during the course of the years has seen his works reach outstanding prices. As a matter of fact, the canvases realised six years ago quoted less than 5 thousand dollars. In time the artist has refined and improved the use of the oil technique, He has made the palette less naturalistic and forced the composition into cinematographic framings. The result has been fantastic: a rise in prices by 1795% in just three years, as proven by the canvas “A Big Family Series”, sold on the 6th July 2003 by Christie’s Hong Kong for 76,622 dollars and then on the 15th October 2006 by Christie’s London for 1,452,075 dollars.
Besides the portraits of the “Big family” series, the subjects that are most appreciated by the market are square Tiananmen and the rare pink babies, all works that quoted at about one million dollars.
But let’s see which have been his most extraordinary hammer prices. One example is “Bloodline: The Big Family No.3, sold by Sotheby’s Hong Kong last April for 47,367,500 HKD, against an estimate of 19.5-27 million HKD. Or another oil belonging to the Bloodline series which, at Beijing’s Hosane, last June, from a valuation of about 714-928 thousand dollars, was sold for 5,376,000 dollars.
Going back to “Bloodline: Big Family, No.2” sold by Christie’s Hong Kong, the piece expresses what Zhang considers typical of his culture of origin. Through the uniformity of this familiar portrait the artist re-examines the symbolic meanings of the portraits and situations that they represent. The work can be considered extremely important as the first example of a series of works that projected the artist into the international arena.
Cultural and spiritual leader of Chinese avant-garde, Zhang offers with his works a special and unique vision of modern China. His works reveal the conscience, the desire and the pain of a nation that before was covered by a veil
Since 1993 Zhang Xiaogang has worked on thematic cycles dedicated to the family or blood ties, drawing inspiration from old family photos. Even in his earliest works the Chinese artist investigates the biunique relationship between memory and oblivion.
What the artists questions is how, given the past experience as a starting point, the present has to be prefigured – as he himself says: “Our past and our present are so distant”. Many people feel lost in the relationship with contemporaneity, and it is this contradiction between the past and present that represents one of the main aspects of present day Chinese society. In his canvases Zhang Xiaogang captures the homogeneous and flattening aspect of the collective social logic – in the gaping expressions and the staring eyes of his characters – with a meticulous technique which recalls an photographic result. Yet small idiosyncrasies, a slight strabismus, a pair of glasses or an imperfect tooth reveal that behind every image a precise psychological identity is hidden, despite being in contradiction with the flattening imposed by society.
Born in 1958, Zhang Xiaogang witnessed this period of Chinese history, with the eyes of a child and then of an adolescent. Even in this sense, his oeuvre appears as an attempt to put back into cycle the contents of a memory that have been forgotten too quickly, a way to make the crucial role of the individual mind remerge, after years of being bridled and held back by the reins of the collectivist Chinese society.