Zhou Tiehai

Art & Public, Geneva
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Hou Hanru, Frédéric Le Gourierec, Ego - Zhou Tiehai, Beijing, 2006, illustrated in color

This work appears to be in a very good general condition. There are no visible condition problems. The work was not examined under UV light.
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Zhou Tiehai is famous for his long, ongoing series using Joe Camel, an American pop icon that immediately brings to mind the Camel cigarettes mascot. Zhou is based in Shanghai, a city known for its commercial interests and openness to foreign trade, and Zhou's camel head, always sporting cool sunglasses, mocks a materialism derived from the West but now equally Chinese. For many years, Zhou has been substituting the camel head in compositions that recall famous historical paintings of the West; by replacing both male and female heads of traditional figurative paintings, Zhou exposes to public notice the absurdity of Occidental legacies, especially as experienced by an Asian artist. At the same time, too, Joe Camel enables Zhou to create strikingly independent artistic icons of his own, in which it is sometimes hard to tell whether homage or ridicule of Western art legacies is his principal intention. His transformation of an advertising mascot into a travesty of high-art portrait conventions, however, reminds us that Chinese artists have their own independent, often critical ways of looking at Western cultural traditions.

In the large acrylic on canvas entitled Man Ray, Meret Oppenheim (2006), Zhou has airbrushed a Joe Camel head onto the nude body of Meret Oppenheim, the famous female Surrealist artist who was photographed by Man Ray in 1933, resulting in the work which Zhou has borrowed. In the black-and-white painting we see the woman grasping a very large industrial wheel with her right hand; her left shoulder, arm, and palm are covered with paint. The patent silliness of the image is contradicted, to some extent, by the extreme skill Zhou demonstrates with the airbrush, itself a medium associated more with commercial art than with the avant-garde. The painting owes everything to historical precedent, but it establishes its independence by undermining the well-known image with an absurd, even Surrealist substitution.

In an Untitled work completed ca. 2000, again using airbrush on canvas, Zhou portrays Joe Camel in a black suit standing behind a large black globe that reflects the sky above him. In the background lies a snowy mountain range, painted in the same blue and white hues as the sky. The figure rests his right hand on the sphere, while his left hand supports his chin in what seems to be a gesture of reserved calm and self-satisfaction. We can't be sure exactly what this particular anthropomorphized dromedary represents, other than an incarnation of Zhou's own self-assured iconic vocabulary. Even so, Zhou's technical skill well suits his poker-faced transformations. And the diversity and range of his repeated jokey morphings have established the significance of this intriguing body of work.

-Jonathan Goodman