Tang Zhigang
Humor is the most important thing in art. There is always suffering beneath a humorous surface.
Tang Zhigang via cgkunming.org, 2018
In Tang Zhigang’s work (1959, China), it’s all about the absurdity of the bureaucracy in institutional life. Tang was a painter for the People’s Liberation Army for twenty years, attracting criticism for the supposedly inadequate degree of socialist realism in his portraiture of leaders. By portraying the great and the good of Communist China as toddlers caught up in an all too serious game, and by shrinking the format to that of a child, he gives vent to his ironic view of the endless rounds of meetings and of the party bosses themselves. Tang puts this message across cogently, without any banality, and in a realistic painting style.
