Facing a Distant China

A century has passed since the end of imperial rule in China, and the intervening years have brought especially rapid economic and social change; human faces looking out and surveying the landscape see an ever more distant China. Whether one gazes toward the past, considers changes in the present, or envisions the future, a growing distance seems to separate, isolate, and sometimes alienate the individual from his or her time and place, society and culture. The idyllic vision of the Chinese landscape rendered in traditional brush and ink increasingly seems like a remote island around which memories of the past, dilemmas of the present, and visions of the future are constructed. What a nineteenth-century official dressed in imperial garb beholds with seeming authority differs from the contemporary anxiety of the young boy linked to the past by a bloodline, seen in Zhang Xiaogang’s Comrade Boy. The masked faces of the pair of urbanites wearing two-piece suits in Zeng Fanzhi’s Mask Series: No. 3 distance the subjects from their world while at the same time disguising their true identities.