signed in Chinese and pinyin and dated 1994, framed

Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong
Acquired directly from the above by current owner

Sao Paulo, Brazil, 22nd International Biennial of Sao Paulo, October - December 1994
Amsterdam, Rothmans Amsterdam, Groei in de collectie Peter Stuyvesant, September 1997 - October 1997
Zevenaar, Rothmans Zevenaar, Groei in de collectie Peter Stuyvesant, October 1997 - November 1997
Oostende, PMMK, René Magritte en de Hedendaagse Kunst, April 1998 - June 1998
Amsterdam, PAN Amsterdam, September 1999 - October 1999
Province de Namur, Faces, October 1999 - December 1999

Chinese Contemporary Art at 22nd International Biennial of Sao Paulo, Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong, 1994, pp. 44-45

Umbilical Cord of History: Paintings by Zhang Xiaogang, Hanart TZ Gallery/Galerie Enrico ဣNavarra, Hong Kong, 2004,💮 pp. 51, 175

Lu Peng, ed., Chinese Contemporary Artists Volumes, Series II- Zhang Xiaogang, Sichuan Fine Arts Publishing House, 2007, p. 67

Minor cracks with associated paint loss along the edges. Minor abrasions in the edges and in the corners. Light surface abrasion to the girl's upper right body, approx 10cm. Very minor paint flake, approx 3mm, positioned approx 40cm down from the top and 52cm in from the left edges. Possible area of retouching in the top left corner. Abrasion just above the bottom edge, approx 9cm, near the bottom right corner. Diagonal stretcher mark barely visible in the top left of the canvas. Otherwise generally in good condition.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Held in 1994, the 22^nd Sao Paulo Biennale of Contemporary art was a major milestone for the international reception of contemporary Chinese art. While the first plunge had been made more than a year earlier with the inclusion of several Chinese artists at the 1993 Venice Biennale, and while early reports such as Andrew Solomon's cover story in the New York Times Magazine in December of that year were beginning to make their way into the foreign press, there was still slight chance for a Western art-world insider (let alone the ordinary viewer) to see much ⛎of the new work being done in the Post-1989 period. In curator Li Xiant﷽ing's classic phrase, Chinese contemporary art at that moment was the "spring roll" served at the banquet of the international art world.

Enter Johnson Tsong-zung Chang, then a young dealer with an unrivaled knowledge of the mainland scene. At the Sao Paulo organizers' request, he curated two mini-exhibitions of three Chinese artists each. The first, entitled The Remaking of Mass Culture, included Li Shan, Yu Youhan, and Wang Guangyi—the fathers of the movement that would later be dubbed "Political Pop." Heavy on images of Mao, this first exhibition showcased what Chang called "a fascination with the glamour and theatricity of the Revolution." The second exhibition, entitled Wakefulness and the Weightless Present, assembled works that played with historical memory and contemporary malaise by three now familiar names: Fang Lijun, Liu Wei, and Zhang Xiaogang. The aim of this exh♏ibition was to explore a condition described by Chang as "directionless and weightless, suspended in time."

Although Zhang Xiaogang had shown in Chang's touring China's New Art: Post-89 exhibition as in a number of early China shows such as Mao Goes Pop in Australia, Sao Paulo was his first appearance at a major international exhibition. In preparation for this debut, he honed the style in which he had been working in the years just after 1989—the style that gave rise to his three vistas of Tian'anmen Square, and that culminated in the rougher of his early family portraits—producing now a body of four canvases which appeared here for the first time under the rubric of Bloodlines, a name given by Chang. This cycle includes just two family portraits, of which the present work is the first, as well as canvases entitled Two Comrades and Three Comrades. For Zhang Xiaogang, this outing was momentous in two senses: it placed his work for the first time in the international spotlight, and marked the mature outlines of a style he would continue to develop until the preseౠnt.

It is no exaggeration, then, to say that the present work, Bloodline: Big Family No.1 (Lot 11), is the most significant example of Zhang Xiaogang's Bloodlines series ever to come to the market. For Zhang, the four Sao Paulo canvases were nothing less than a breakthrough. It is in these several works that the explorations which occupied Zhang Xiaogan✃g in the four years following 1989 crystallize into a uniquely powerful lexicon of form and color𝓰.

In this image, an intellectual-turned-worker of a father nurtures a sad son and daughter who each wear Chairman Mao's likeness upon their chest. The two major motifs of the Bloodlines series—patches of light shining irregularly upon the sitters' faces and a thread-like red line connecting them—are here fully mature and visible. The figures seethe a timid solemnity intensified by the radical palette that renders their skin in off-tone hues of red and yellow, the colors of the People's Repubic. But the overwhelming impression is one of a vast expanse of grey, the darkness perhaps of historical memory, from which any particular individual can only peek out for moments at a time. Not unlike the swimming motif explored by Zhang's colleagues Liu Wei and Fang Lijun in the same exhibition, the overwhelming impression given by the subjects of these early Bloodlines canvases is o♍f the urgency of having to come up for air.

As Jo💯hnson Chang wrote in the short essay accompanying this exhibition:

"A sense of tragic resignation pervades Zhang's Bloodline Series. One feels that the artist has just come to the realizati💮on that this predicament was preordained by his forbears, and there is no escape. Imageries of his relatives loom large in his imagination, many paint🥃ed in a 1920s Chinese portrait technique to emphasise the un-reality of their presence. Zhang seems to be condemned to an endless nightmare of wakefulness, in which his connection to others is based not on communication, but upon fateful blood ties."

Looking back on the early 1990s from the heights of 2008, it is difficult to remember the poignancy with which such feelings of determinism and despair were shouldered by this founding generation of contemporary Chinese artists. Having come through the intellectual ferment of the 1980s and the historical trauma of 1989, they stood at the dawn of a new era, confused as to what their proper duty might be to their historical inheritance. Zhang Xiaogang's earliest Bloodlines portrait, then, is as much a reflection of the moment at which it was painted as meditation on the socialist period which it ostensibly depicts. Zhang Xiaogang's first mature mas♋terpi🐭ece is a double mirror, illuminating a dark past through an already receding present.