{"id":2544,"date":"2015-04-01T10:47:33","date_gmt":"2015-04-01T10:47:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.galerieloft.com\/artist\/zhang-xiaogang-2\/"},"modified":"2026-04-04T15:47:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-04T15:47:07","slug":"zhang-xiaogang","status":"publish","type":"artist","link":"https:\/\/www.galerieloft.com\/en\/artists\/zhang-xiaogang\/","title":{"rendered":"Zhang Xiaogang"},"content":{"rendered":"

Zhang Xiaogang<\/strong> was born in 1958 in Kunming, in the Chinese province of Yunnan. He is recognized as a member of the Chinese artistic avant-garde, and as a spokesperson for a whole lost generation. During the Cultural Revolution, many young people were sent to the countryside for several years to work and complete their \u201cpolitical training\u201d. Their living conditions were harsh, far from their families. When they finally returned to town, their reintegration was difficult. The bitterness born of this experience will have a decisive impact on Zhang’s artistic creations. A graduate of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 1982, he was greatly influenced by the works of Vincent Van Gogh and Millet.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

During the 1995 Venice Biennale, he exhibited the first portraits from his Bloodline series, now recognized and exhibited worldwide. His subjects are inspired by old photos showing sparse families, weakened by the Cultural Revolution. The characters in uniform, silent, with closed eyes, are so many anonymous symbols of individual stories denied and silenced. They are linked by a red thread, a symbolic color of the revolution but also a link of blood and suffering, a thread originating in a forbidden city depicted as the keystone of Chinese society, a metaphor for an all-powerful state. This series is considered on the international scene as the manifesto of a whole generation of contemporary Chinese artists, and the expression of \u201cthe Chinese soul\u201d. The artist often resorts to areas of bright colors, contrasting in an almost schizophrenic way with the greyish monochrome tints of his paintings, as if to signify the deep generational and ideological fractures within Chinese society. He continues to explore, with these portraits, the consequences of the cultural revolution or the one-child policy on private and social life, denouncing both totalitarianism denying people and individualism atomizing them in a China now converted to excessive capitalism. He currently lives and works between Sichuan and Beijing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Zhang Xiaogang was born in 1958 in Kunming, in the Chinese province of Yunnan. He is recognized as a member of the Chinese artistic avant-garde, and as a spokesperson for a whole lost generation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":998,"template":"","artist_cat":[24],"class_list":["post-2544","artist","type-artist","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","artist_cat-painter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.galerieloft.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist\/2544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.galerieloft.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.galerieloft.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/artist"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.galerieloft.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.galerieloft.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.galerieloft.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist_cat?post=2544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}