I was trained as a painter when I was young, but I stopped painting for a while after moved to the United States from China in 1982, because I came to believe that "painting had died" (Though I don't think so any more.)

I experimented with many different materials and tried to make objects that existed between two dimensional painting and three dimensional sculpture. I became more interested in something behind the surface of art.

In 1990, I started to cut out images from various materials to lighten the object and create a mental space for viewers.

Lee Hui-Shu wrote in The Significance of a Bagel, the catalogue of Zhang Hongtu's exhibition at Hong Kong University of science and Technology 1996:

“Whether it is dismantling and reconstructing to make a positive image or carving away to reveal a negative image, Zhang Hongtu's thoughtful reflections on these series of cultural icons were all based on his personal experiences. Working from these experiences, he produced a body of creative work that is both systematic and theoretical. This writer personally finds the cut-out series the most compelling conceptually and philosophically. An image of absence takes the place of what was formerly in Zhang's hands a ridiculed but compelling, full-colored positive icon. In that silent, empty space still hovers the power of the icon, whose familiar form remains present in the relief. The indelible visual impression works with the viewer's psyche, and one finds oneself lost in thought, transfixed by that empty void. Zhang Hongtu's cut-outs remind one of Laozi's theory of form generated by nothingness, or Zhuangzi's idea of the equality of all things, breaking the boundaries of small and large, high and low. The empty space is like a bottomless black hole that draws the viewer deeply within. Or perhaps like a mirror, reflecting and amplifying one's thoughts. The emptiness thus transforms into a process of endless possibilities; resolution is left to the viewer.”