Zhang Xiaogang’s exhibitions can feel like a dream loop in which you keep entering the same room only to find the furniture has been rearranged. For the past three decades, his paintings have consistently returned to certain motifs and settings: drab interiors, books, obsolete appliances. References to the home decor of Maoist China and the consumer goods of the reform era hint at a collector’s impulse, a need to cling onto the material culture of a turbulent and rapidly changing milieu.
For “Lost,” a recent solo presentation, Zhang brought a renewed strangeness to familiar subject matter. The painting Light No. 9, 2022, depicts a book with a plum cover served on a white platter. A minuscule power cord threads its way across the taupe countertop in the foreground, producing a distorted sense of scale. In Light No. 10, 2022, a severed hand clutches a flashlight in a bathroom sink. Both works feature Zhang’s signature patches of translucent color: a red scrim over a corner of the book, and a fuchsia film spreading from the edge of the basin. Contrary to the series title, these irregular blotches resemble, not areas of light, but gauze, veiling instead of illuminating the objects.
The painted paper collages forming the series “Three Major Pics,” 2020, portray a refrigerator, a color television set, and a washing machine—status symbols among China’s emerging middle class in the 1980s and ’90s. In each piece, a portal appears to open up amid dense fog to reveal the coveted item. Yet these appurtenances exude dysfunction. The washing machine, based on the first model that Zhang’s father purchased, is unplugged; the television broadcasts a black-and-white picture of a brick wall covered in illegible Chinese scrawl. Cables and other components traverse the raised borders that enclose the inset appliances, dispelling the illusion of perspectival depth. The conflation of different planes is compounded by the torn edges of the layered paper sheets that form the works’ substrates, as well as by the two-dimensional grids scratched onto the surfaces. Zhang’s oeuvre is often associated with nostalgia, but these marred images, alluding to unfulfilled aspirations, reevaluate rather than romanticize the domestic ideals of the time.
Inspired by more recent history, the oil-on-canvas Safe House No. 1, 2021, depicts a bed and a side table inside a shoebox, evoking the claustrophobia of quarantine. Warped metal wires, some the length of the cot, surround the structure like serpentine sentinels. A disturbing analogy between patient and prey arises from the work’s juxtaposition with Light No. 12, 2023, a painting of a crate of raw meat on a plastic stool. The artist amplifies the incongruities in these dreary scenes with jarring bursts of color, seen in the vibrant bands of pink, azure, and buttercup that adorn the bedding in Safe House No. 1 and the sanguine rack of beef in Light No. 12.
Zhang’s haunting compositions remarkably capture the emotional valence of memory. Humans are notoriously bad at remembering things as they really were; what is indelibly imprinted is fear or loneliness or longing or hope. “Lost” demonstrated the affective power of Zhang’s distinctive oeuvre and the enduring grip of the past on our uncertain present.
— Ophelia Lai