Zhang Hongtu

Jerome Silbergeld, Zhang Hongtu an On-Going Painting Project, New York, 2000, pp. 10-11, illustrated in color

One of the first contemporary artists to come to America from China, arriving from Beijing in 1982, Zhang Hongtu has consistently attracted enthusiastic viewers to his projects, which are often conceptual but never forego the visual element entirely.  In 1995, for the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York City, Zhang produced the exhibition “Zhang Hongtu: Material Mao,” for which he created such objects as a ping pong table with the outline of Mao cut into both sides of the playing field and a door with a sound recording of knocking and pinhole through which one peeped upon the stern face of the Great Leader himself.  Zhang often relies upon humor to deliver his sophisticated intelligence about cultural difference and the Chinese art tradition.  Transforming the man on the Quaker Oats container into Mao with a few strategic brushstrokes, for example, the resemblance between the two is comically strong.

Perhaps Zhang’s best-known project is his reinterpretation of the Chinese classical canon through the appropriated styles of Cézanne, van Gogh, and Monet.  This literal conflation of Chinese compositions with signature Western styles offers an artist’s insight into the revelations that occur when entire paradigms are shifted from one context to another.  The artist jests with our underlying assumptions about historical achievements, both Eastern and Western. A mixed composition such as Fan Kuan-van Gogh (1998, Lot 229) shows two herders with animals at the base of a very large cliff; a stream cascades down a smaller group of rocks just before the herders’ path, while the sheer face of the rock is painted a dusky gold superimposed on gray. At the top of the painting an expressionist yellow sky features a brilliant sun encircled by rhythmic brushstrokes. The color language and facture unequivocally suggest the hand of van Gogh.  But once the viewer recovers from the surprise of the style, the composition opens to a reading that gleefully undermines what is usually expected from an artist or even from a tradition.

The melding appropriates different artistic approaches and histories for the cause of cultural understanding.  The Chinese composition is transformed into something Western while the Western style is rendered idiosyncratic, open to analysis, by its presentation of a great Chinese landscape. Zhang intends that each tradition inform the other in this light-handed synthesis of differing styles.  But we should be aware that the implications, and also the consequences, of this skillful amalgamation are profoundly contemporary, reflecting the internalization of what have become globalized forms.  Woven into the seeming disjunctions of the paintings is the notion that culture can in fact reflect and refract contrasting styles and modes of thought.  This is a fundamental premise of Zhang’s project,  which never fails to question the implications of qualities of mind expressed differently, even if only to prove that the dissimilarity is erased when truly understood.  What does it mean to be a Chinese painter today?  What does it mean to be a Western artist?  Zhang’s paintings ask us to reflect upon these important questions by offering startling versions of recognizably great achievements.

The Parts of My Body (1996-1998, Lot 230), a mixed-media collection of images, is composed, as the title suggests, of pictures of the artists body parts—an ear, a fist, an open palm—with most fragments presented with a metal decoration of some sort that emphasizes the object quality of the human form.  These pictures, made during the 1990s, are true-life versions of Zhang’s body, directly scanned into the computer.  The work demonstrates Zhang’s obsessive visual dissection of his body—the physical entity that makes him the individual he is.

Trinity (1992, Lot 231) consists of three cutout figures sitting around a bowl; the negative space of their forms, drawn from Russian religious culture, relates to Zhang’s obsessive repetition of negative-space Mao images, a project undertook at the same time and another of his key series.

All Natural (1990, Lot 232) is composed entirely of burlap.  According to the artist, the piece is meant to validate social cohesiveness despite its raw simplicity and rough surface.  The humble material along with the phrase “All Natural” signifies, in the artist’s mind, the essential similarity of all kinds of people, no matter their cultural background. And like all of Zhang’s works, All Natural intrigues both visually and intellectually.