Calm yet irrational; full of illusion yet maintaining an appropriate restraint; genuinely horrific yet giving people a sense of strangeness; using visible objects, but leading people’s thinking into invisible tunnels, presenting some kind of mysterious philosophy and grey humour – this charm of Magritte’s long fascinated me, and at the same time became a kind of long-term value judgment on, and realm to pursue in, my own art.

(Zhang Xiaogang, My Close Friend – Magritte, 2000[Selected])

Whether it is ‘consanguinity’ or Family, it is a personal narrative in the true sense. When Zhang Xiaogang established his own orientation as an artist of the ‘interior monologue’ type, creating a post-God ‘personal world’ became a top priority. This was the transformation from a metaphysical religious narrative to an empirical individual narrative, from an abstract life existence to asking questions in a specifically secular living, and from a pious Kafka to a blasphemous Kundera. It was also visually a transformation from symbolic expression to image depiction, and from spatial narrative to temporal narrative.

Family was still about the destiny of the solitary individual in history and in the collective, but those historicized shared worlds did not only construct the background to the life of the individual, but were also the direct matrix in which the individual destiny could unfold. This subject is very similar to the Buendía family of Macondo in the writings of Gabriel García Márquez. Although Family cannot contribute the grand and bizarre historical scenes and the ups and downs of the human fortunes of the latter, yet regardless of the questions involved and the ways of expressing them, we can still find things that they have in common, such as the blending and clashing of family archetypes with mutated modern destinies, the great psychological panic and anxiety created by the disappearance of time and memory, and the alienation and feeling of distance created by the imagistic symbolic narrative. From this angle, Family resembles One Hundred Years of Solitude even more, as an ‘epic of everyday life’ about ordinary Chinese people.

(Huang Zhuan, Zhang Xiaogang: The Multiple Worlds of a Modern Narrator, 2008[Selected])