「Look at the Picture and Talk about the Painting」Zhang Zikang: Artistic Resonance in the Pain of Life

When images have become fast-food commodities, Zhang Zikang’s paintings deliberately create visual resistance. There is no smooth narrative, no clear outlines. In the interwoven black, gray, white and earthy yellow scenes, the textures are rough and jagged like carvings, and the figures are struggling between disintegration and reassembly. He deliberately breaks the viewer’s comfort zone. By using comprehensive materials such as ink wash and oil painting to enhance this “anti-comfortable” expression, combined with roughly piled-up textures, blurred human figures, and broken structures, he dissolves identity labels and deliberately keeps the visual perception constantly frustrated, forcing the awakening of numb perception.

His creations contain deconstructive wisdom. They break down the concrete into abstract elements and integrate the abstract back into the concrete. Lines and ink blocks move between “similarity and dissimilarity”. This unstable visual experience aligns with the cognitive leap of Zen Buddhism, “Seeing the mountain as not a mountain”, where the viewer cannot passively receive information but can only involuntarily immerse themselves in the picture. The compression of those faceless bodies is not only a projection of violent traces but also the manifestation of Lacan’s “gaze loop”, revealing the viewer’s deep empathy for the fragility of life.

These silent figures in the painting eventually become an ethical call. Just like Levinas’s “the face of the other”, the indistinct forms demand attention with their fragility, irrelevant to identity but directly pointing to the essence of life. The Daoist concept of “emptiness of nature” and Heidegger’s “being-towards-death” are merged here: The disappearance of the picture is not an end, but the manifestation of the true nature of life. Zhang Zikang’s works tell us that art does not need to explain life, but can enable us to regain reverence for existence in this perception.

The tea for today is all gone. Next time, I’ll brew a fresh pot and enjoy art with you again.