Titles for exhibitions or artworks are contentious things. They can, at times, be useful: a practical tool for managing a body of work that helps the artist catalogue individual paintings (ditto critics and collectors); they can, at other times, be revealing, thanks to the careful wording that we assume goes into this choice on the part of the artist. And so such words can reward the viewer with an added dimension of understanding—or so it seems. How Zhao Gang’s choice of title relates to our experience of his paintings, then, is an interesting question, especially given the artist’s 2011 exhibition was called A Sick Man, and contained a series of works under the name Hyperthyroid and yet another titled Diabetic. That these paintings are astonishing needs no explanation, or they would not be included here, but it is partly the tension set up by Zhao Gang’s meticulous use of words that makes these works so memorable.
A Sick Man focused on a group of five life paintings: studies of the female form depicted in the kind of poses we associate with observations of the human body that usually begin in art school and rarely get to graduate with the artist in this post-modern world. If viewing these works as reproductions, which is inevitable here, they might well appear to waver on the cusp of twentieth-century modernism—the body as put through the artistic mills of Pablo Picasso, Egon Schiele, Otto Dix and Lucian Freud. Yet the style that Zhao Gang brings to these paintings is one that seemingly distils all the different types of life painting that have gone before along with the addition of distinctly more post-modern seams, such as anxiety, vulnerability and fragility, all beating at the core. The figures themselves are awkward and ungainly, and yet magnificent. We see no obvious sickness in their appearance, nor, indeed, in the environment in which they are placed. Instead, the “natural”, unsurprising backdrops consist of green grass, or a cobalt blue sky, or the cool afternoon light of a placid atelier. There’s no whiff of sickness in these clean pastel tones.
It is the contrast between the ambience of the backdrop and the figures that demands attention. As too does their awkwardness, which is primarily found in the foreshortening of limbs and the improbable proportions of breasts, thighs and torsos, rather than a discernible psychological state. But that is not what strikes the eye when you stand before these works. Rather, it is their immense size: up to eight metres in height and width, and with a median scale of around four to five metres. Think about it. They’re huge. In terms of human endeavour, the completion of even one of these five paintings represents a grand gesture. Yes, art history provides examples of artists who painted billboards for a living before being able to devote their time to art, but Zhao Gang’s paintings have nothing to do with the kind of scale that billboard experience might inspire.
Perhaps it is because the contemporary urban environment is flooded with building-sized commercial images of models that Zhao Gang’s building-sized paintings of the human form have such a striking presence. The tentative nature of the brush marks, as well as the sense that composite elements have been pieced together at different times, are deliberate and conscious signs that these are paintings; Zhao Gang needs us to recognise that fact. It’s not about scale for the sake of scale, but about altering our intuitive assumptions about the traditions of life painting and the conventions surrounding the (female) nude in art. As has been said: ‘Since the impact of feminism, the female nude has become something of a battleground, regarded by many as an object of the patriarchal male gaze.’ That idea of battleground may explain the awkwardness with which these women present themselves to us. For some painters, then, it is a topic best avoided, unless the goal is to reclaim the body—a task usually ascribed to female artists—or to subvert the convention. Here, in these five works, Zhao Gang does that amazingly well.
