“The Bloodline Series” by Zhang Xiaogang.

Question: What inspires you?

Melissa Chiu: I think I would have to say that seeing a great work of art is incredibly inspiring. I think that while I couldn't necessarily identify an individual who would inspire me, I think that that . . . seeing . . . seeing a compelling, poignant work that speaks to our time, that says something about current day issues, or politics, or how an artist was experiencing the world around them I think is an incredible experience. And I think that that's what really probably drew me to this field.

Question: Is there a work of art you find particularly inspiring?

Melissa Chiu: I think the one work that certainly comes to mind is a series of paintings called “The Bloodline Series” by an artist called Zhang Xiaogang. And I was lucky enough to see one of his first solo exhibitions in China. In fact, now he’s one of the hottest kind of highest ranking artists – Chinese artists – in the marketplace. But I think that when I . . . when I saw his work in the early 1990s – and in fact his solo show must have been in 1995 or something like that in Beijing at the Central Academy Gallery – I was immediately taken aback by the power of the images. They . . . They are usually painted on quite a large scale, and the portraits of families taken from the time of the Cultural Revolution. And they resemble old-style family portraits. And so they obviously have this nostalgia for Chinese people; but the way that they’re rendered with such delicacy . . . and the bloodline, which obviously has so many connotations about ancestry and things like that. But also I think for Chinese people, it also has a reference to one’s allegiances, whether it is in fact to one’s family and ancestry, or to the Communist party. And each of the family members in these portraits is joined by this very faint red line which is, of course, the bloodline.

Recorded on: 7/11/07