Zhang Xiaogang has once stated: "We all live in a big family. The first lesson we have to learn is how to protect ourselves and keep our experiences locked up in an inner chamber away from the prying eyes of others, while at the same time living in harmony as a member of this big family. In this sense, the family is a unit for the continuity of life and an idealized mechanism for procreation. It embodies power, hope, life, envy, lies, duty and love. The family becomes the standard model and the focus for the contradictions of life experiences. We interact and depend on each other for support and assurance." From the mid-1990s onwards, the relationship between the individual to the family, and the family to the larger society, has been the driving concern of Zhang Xiaogang's art. Through this lens, Zhang explores the tensions and experiences of his generation, translating them into powerful, fragile and iconic expressions of experiences that defined his times.

Having grown up at a time when political and social identities overshadowed natural affections within a family, collectivism and uniformity were valued over the traditional values of the family. This loss of individual identity is translated into deliberately muted portraits of figures in apparently dream-like states. As with the single figure portrait featured here (Lot 427), painted in 2000, Zhang applies monochrome colours flatly in many layers, imitating the technique in traditional Chinese charcoal painting, and transforms it into a quiet meditation on history and individual destiny. The resulting soft and misty tone creates a surrealistic sense of distance to express the artist's wistfulness and nostalgia. Mimicking conventional studio portraits, we recall the innocence of childhood; but Zhang heightens our empathy for the viewer with his attention to the saddened, deep eyes, youthful haircut, the formality of the buttoned up collar on this youthful and innocent boy. Zhang further adds slight, intentional aberrations to the surface of the figure. These flashes of color appear birthmark-like patches of light, suggesting a breach, like a trauma that becomes written literally into the flesh of the figure, permanently altering their identity. As a result, the viewer's response turns less towards the sweet nostalgia of the past and more towards speculation of what fate may have befallen this child. Through such subtle and restrained images, allusions and methods, Zhang creates a poetic metaphor for the anxiety, sensitivity and confusion of a generation, and one that has become among the most iconic series that has defined the last several decades of Chinese contemporary art.