The poster boy for contemporary Chinese art is Zhang Xiaogang, born in 1958, whose androgynous, expressionless family groups of the Bloodline: The Big Family series, based on family photographs taken in the 1920s, are an inevitable fixture in auctions and exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art. Other Chinese artists have exploited the ‘big face’ genre, but none so successfully as Xiaogang, who, according to Artprice, outsold Jeff Koons at auction in 2006. In March this year, Bloodline: Three Comrades (1994) made more than $2 million at Sotheby’s New York, and in September Chapter of a New Century – Birth of the People’s Republic of China (1992) sold for $3.065m, also at Sotheby’s. Charles Saatchi has big holdings of Xiaogang’s work, which will feature in the exhibition New Chinese Art at the opening of the new Saatchi gallery in Chelsea early next year. Not everyone appreciates the series of highly similar works that Xiaogang produces, with help from assistants, in his three studios in Beijing, Sichuan and Chengdu; but as long as the market pays increasingly frenzied prices for his work, he seems happy to continue. Earlier this year PaceWildenstein announced that it would be representing Xiaogang, along with another superhot Chinese artist, Zhang Huan, in the US. An exhibition of Xiaogang’s work will be held in the gallery next spring.