Figure 1, Chinese Offspring, Zhang Dali, Saatchi Gallery, 2003
This installation encompasses Zhang Dali’s mission to visually aestheticize the foundation of everyday life in China. His rebellious attitude is evident in this exhibit as he portrays the social deficiencies of working class citizens. In this exhibit he portrays immigrant workers from rural areas of China who have traveled to major cities in order to earn a living providing for their families. These are construction workers who are described as “the most important members of the Chinese race,” because they are literally building the physical foundation of China’s reality. (Saatchi Gallery) Zhang chose to represent these figures because despite their fundamental importance to Chinese society, they remain a “faceless crowd who live at the bottom of out society.” (Saatchi Gallery) In order to create these figures, Zhang cast them in resin, a way of small scale production in which liquid resin in poured into a plastic mold and then hardens. By doing this, he immortalizes their identity and importance, giving them the recognition they are owed and would otherwise never receive. Here, the artist has hung these figures upside down which indicates “the uncertainty of their life and their powerlessness in their own fates.” (Saatchi Gallery)
The gallery describes Zhang Dali’s work as “actively engaging with the rapid changing environment in China… Working across a wide variety of media.. Zhang’s portraits document a contemporary social history of a culture in radical development and flux.” (Saatchi Gallery) Zhang has created one hundred of these sculptures, displaying fifteen in this exhibit, each one of them different. Every one of the resin figures is tattooed with his signature and a number in an effort to pay his respects to the workers and give them a sense of individuality however, also playing on their lack of identity – degrading them to a number rather than a name. The underclass construction workers “contribute to the modernisation process at its most visible level… Zhang’s work not only champions the individual plights of these transient labourers, but also records the one of the most important phenomena of new Chinese order: the growing schism between poverty and wealth.” (Saatchi Gallery) His work exemplifies the irony in that these workers are the epitome of poverty and underdevelopment however their work contributes to the exact opposite, modernization and wealthy corporations. The fact that these figures are bare naked, hanging upside down from their feet exaggerates their sense of vulnerability.
February 4, 2019 at 2:34 am
Your analysis of Zhang Dali’s Chinese Offspring, shows how the human form can be used to evoke a specific message. With Zhang attempting to immortalize and individualize immigrant workers, his faceless figures remain to be interpreted as disposable as Chinese society believes them to be. Your analysis made me think of how the bare human form can be highly politicized rather than sexualized. By stripping the figures of their construction garb, their low placement in society is only emphasized further. For my project, Zhang’s work helped me realize to view the bare human body in not only the context of gender politics but also politics as a whole. I believe Zhang’s work would not have been as moving if the figures were clothed. This figurative and literal stripping of his subjects is critical to Zhang’s message.
February 4, 2019 at 3:06 pm
I am researching and studying the People’s Heroes Monument in Tiananmen Square where Chinese soldiers and personnel are honored. This has helped me view the monument differently because the people in the bas-reliefs are all viewed as heroes and the ones who provided the most for China. However people such as the working class citizens went unnoticed or praised. Saying the working class remains a “faceless crowd who lives at the bottom of our society” helped me rethink how the Chinese government honors or acknowledges those who made it the country it is today. The working class being the most poor yet are most responsible for enriching China also opened my eyes on the thought process of choosing who to honor on the monument.