Zhang Xiaogang’s exhibits can feel like a dream loop in which you keep entering the same room only to find that the furniture has been rearranged. Over the past three decades, his paintings have constantly returned to certain motifs and settings: drab interiors, books, outdated appliances. References to the interior design of Maoist China and Reform-era consumer goods hint at a collector’s impulse, a need to cling to the material culture of a turbulent and rapidly changing milieu.
For “Lost,” a recent solo presentation, Zhang brought a renewed weirdness to a familiar subject. The painting Light #9, 2022, depicts a book with a plum cover served on a white platter. A tiny power cord threads its way across the taupe countertop in the foreground, creating the impression of a distorted scale. In Light #10, 2022, a severed hand clutches a flashlight in a bathroom sink. Both works feature Zhang’s signature translucent patches of color: a red scrim on one corner of the book and a fuchsia film extending from the edge of the basin. Contrary to the title of the series, these irregular spots look, not like areas of light, but like gauze, veiling instead of illuminating objects.
The wallpaper collages forming the “Three Major Pics” series, 2020, depict a refrigerator, color TV and washing machine – status symbols among China’s emerging middle class in the 1980s and 1990s. In each room , a portal appears to open amid thick fog to reveal the coveted item. Yet these affiliations breathe dysfunction. The washing machine, based on the first model purchased by Zhang’s father, is unplugged; the television broadcasts a black and white image of a brick wall covered in an illegible Chinese scribble. Cables and other components pass through the raised edges that surround the recessed fixtures, dispelling the illusion of perspective depth. The merging of different planes is heightened by the torn edges of the overlapping sheets of paper that form the substrates of the works, as well as the two-dimensional grids scraped across the surfaces. Zhang’s work is often associated with nostalgia, but these spoiled images, alluding to unfulfilled aspirations, reassess rather than romanticize the domestic ideals of the time.
Inspired by more recent history, oil on canvas Safe House #1, 2021, depicts a bed and side table inside a shoebox, evoking midlife claustrophobia. Twisted metal wires, some the length of the bed, surround the structure like serpentine sentinels. A disturbing analogy between patient and prey arises from the juxtaposition of the work with Fire No. 12, 2023, a painting of a crate of raw meat on a plastic stool. The artist amplifies the incongruities of these dreary scenes with jarring bursts of color, visible in the vibrant bands of rose, azure and buttercup that adorn the bedding in Safe House #1 and the rack of blood beef in Fire 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 work and the enduring hold of the past on our uncertain present.
