Tang Zhigang

Tang has captured the absurdity of the bureaucracy of institutional life in the most charming manner. The message is succinct without being banal, and the style is as easy and fluid as the subject matter dictates. Tang uses the technique of realism usually associated with social cause and egalitarianism; we think of Soviet art and public-minded American painter after the Depression. It is a style accessible to the common man, mindful of his dignity whatever his station in life. It also suggests serious-mindedness, which becomes the poker-faced, dead-pan, tongue-in-cheek flip of Tang's joke.

For Tang, the laugh is as much on himself as on others. He was born into a family serving in the military. His mother was a prison warden and he grew up with convicts and soldiers, familiar with both the ones who discipline and ones being disciplined. He served in the army as a career soldier, working mainly as an artist in the propaganda division until his dismissal a year ago. He was trained in the system, knows its machinery and sees the human dimension beneath the rules. From the late 1980s, Tang's works have focused on the incongruities and absurdities that put the spark of humanity into a regimented life. He probably had the last laugh when he was finally dismissed in 1996. Now he is an artist, and teaches children's art classes