Tang Zhigang’s little acorns
The seemingly obvious interpretation of Tang Zhigang’s paintings of children in adult roles is that adults — and especially politicians and military types — behave like children. But in a great 2004 essay at the Han Art website, Monica Dematte offers an interesting alternative.
She’d visited the Yunnanese artist in his barracks (the army was his primary career until not long ago) and watched him teaching art to kids. The classes, she wrote, “are actually situations where human relationships are subject to authority and are governed by strict regulations.
“I believe that the painter has found in the children many of the shortcomings which grow more evident when one becomes adult, while some infantile anti-social traits seem to have been disguised in the grown-ups behind a diplomatic curtain of politeness … The children are for him the ’successors of socialism’.
“It is also true that, switching from adults to children, he is somehow playing it safer: humour is greatly accepted and practised in China, but some subjects are still taboo.”
In 1999 Tang — who’s about 49 now and earning half a million dollars for his paintings — started placing youngsters in adult-style meetings, typified by the work above, “Children in Meeting, Hong Kong No 3″. They wear official dress, usually the Mao jackets of the autocracy, and tap at their tea cups, but close by are their toys.
“Every single element is chosen for its symbolic value,” Dematte says. “Subverting the principles of Chinese and Soviet socialist realism, which Tang absorbed during his artistic education in Nanjing and Beijing, he is now forging a breed of anti-hero baby cadres that satirises a whole era.”
It’s all a bit too pat for me, slim in thoughtfulness, but it certainly beats calling Tang’s pieces “cute”.
