翟倞 《革命党人》 布面综合材料  90×75cm  2009

Generic Life
About the work of Zhai Liang

To Zhai Liang nothing is dead knowledge, but all alive and brilliant and full of importance to our lives. Meticulously he digs through the history of his and other countries, constantly on the lookout for figures, words, moments, that have not been shone on by the bright light of remembrance but rather been dragged along in the shadow of the former. A nameless servant of some king, a smell, a playboy poet whose fame got swept away by the change of dynasties, leaving him penniless and reminiscing about his former glamorous life in Hangzhou, where the fish taste best.

Even as a child, Liang says, he was interested in figures not showered in the feedback of the crowd, because, he explains, losers live in unheroic details, whereas heroes live heroic lives. So he constructs his paintings out of a nostalgia for the forgotten, they are covered with the marks of time and yet beyond the sentimental. There is no trace of commiserating in the paintings, his figures might seem tribulating but not like individuals; they seem to stand for something - they are portraits of human beings in their symbolic quality.

You could say that Zhai Liangs work is about us humans who behave according to their status, their situation, their function; with some of us succeeding now and then through our creativity, strength or birth to excel above others - only to leave them looking even more pale and doomed to fade into forgottenness.

Bianca Regle