Untitled
Zhao Gang
赵刚
Production date
2006
Object Detail
Media
oil on canvas
Measurements
200.5 x 300 cm
Notes
Untitled (2006) appears at first sight somewhat mysterious. Five straight stalks of bamboo are lined up across the canvas, as if they have become chimneys belching smoke, light grey on the left and dense black on the right. In Zhao’s painting the supple bamboo brush-strokes of the literati painters are recast as industrial smokestacks. The work is a satirical reference to paintings of bamboo by Xu Beihong (1895 –1953), the western-trained artist who denounced Chinese traditional painting as moribund but also condemned Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Pierre Bonnard as shameless in his 1929 essay ‘Perplexities’. After 1949, as the head of the All-China Artists’ Federation and president of Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, Xu Beihong exerted a profound, some would say negative, influence on Chinese art. Zhao Gang believes Xu Beihong’s influence on the development of contemporary art was damaging. Within these coded references to Chinese idioms, Untitled also echoes aspects of the style of the mid-twentieth century American painter Philip Guston, in its solid, simplified forms and shades of pink and grey.
Accession number
2007.087