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Lot 518: TANG ZHIGANG

Est: $1,200,000 HKD - $1,600,000 HKD
Christie'sHong Kong, Hong KongMay 24, 2009

Item Overview

Description

TANG ZHIGANG
(b. 1959)
Chinese Fairytale
signed 'Tang' in Pinyin; dated '06' (lower right)
oil on canvas
130 x 162 cm. (51 1/8 x 63 3/4 in.)
Painted in 2006

Artist or Maker

Provenance

Red Bridge Gallery, Shanghai
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Notes

As a contemporary artist, Tang Zhigang has thus far experienced a great deal in his unique life. Through an analysis of his works, one may conclude that Tang is a person who can tell rather cold jokes, someone who sees life as amusement and may, at times, behave in a manner akin to his subjects - like an old naughty child. From a very young age, Tang was enclosed within an environment of extreme political bureaucracy. His father was an officer in the Red Army and his childhood spent at the Kunyang Labour farm, where his mother was a prison warden, bestowed upon him a unique introduction to the highly institutionalized world that was to become a prevalent part of his later life. As a solider, art teacher and painter of propaganda for the Political Department of the Army, he created an impressively diverse oeuvre throughout his years as he pondered the general state of mind of modern people, and blatantly addressed the anxiety and mental pressure overspreading in the contemporary era.

Four children lay under the sky, covered in sand with jovial laughter in Chinese Fairytale (Lot 518). However the emptiness of the beach is only filled with visual motifs that appear bizarrely isolated despite its surrounding companion of a dog, umbrella, four children, rocks and a rake. With the vacancy of the beach and Tang's painterly depiction bestowing a seemingly flat and firm outlook on landscape, he deliberately suggests the deadly silence of nature; devoid of moving clouds, waves and sun settling an uncomfortable visual imprisonment. This powerful muting of the sound of life beget the viewer to scrutinize the scarce visual entities, only to realize the inert placement of the statuesque presentation of the dog, the discarded position of the rake, arbitrary existence of the rock, geometrically straight standing beach umbrella and at last but most authoritative, the ambiguity of the children's laughter.

Tang slots pictorial traces of prior episodes that confirm the violent prologue of the scene as the rake lingers as a testimony tool that deeply buried these children and the dog's diligent posture that impress its mission as a guard dog. As the viewer accepts that the children are arrested under the force of nature far from reality and in remote confinement, the scene further unravels its inmost darkness as we realize Tang's shrewd yet simple insertion of four children that adeptly tallies to the Gang of Four, leftist Communist party officials of Cultural Revolution. Tang jails the political history in his canvas as a patriotic duty to his country as the abolition of Gang of Four was noted as the end of Cultural Revolution, tormenting these figures in dreary solitude, breaking them into fanatic laughter. Under surveillance of the military green umbrella and sea, the fluid washes of the sky drips down to the sand as an ominous mimicry of washing away the painting, thus erasure of the context and history. Perhaps a premeditated technical choice; the diluted washes of oil may reveal a slight anxiety of Tang in his endeavour to subconsciously erase his memory, despite concurrently wanting to punish the past by caging it or moreover as an act to confront the politics and hostility of the past.

Redolent of his military habits, Tang's heedful comprehension on hierarchical merit of placement and impeccable compositional organization is often seen in his recent oeuvres. Here, he aligns the four in straight compact spacing, knowingly portraying the infinity of the landscape with thin paint application stemming a visual expansion with its purity of colour and minimalism. Intentional in his practice, Tang injects a perceptual claustrophobia on the viewer as we imagine the rest of the space outside the canvas as empty and unlimited. Nevertheless his ingenious superficial coating of lively and jolly children curiously enthrals the viewer, successfully eliminating such melancholy to ultimately create a heart-warming scene of ostensible child's play, perhaps to ask the audience to not forget this destructive historical era and instead for us to confront and learn from the mistakes of the past.

Auction Details

Asian Contemporary Art and Chinese 20th Century Art (Evening Sale)

by
Christie's
May 24, 2009, 07:00 PM ChST

2203-8 Alexandra House 16-20 Chater Road, Hong Kong, HK