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“Material Mao, Zhang Hongtu’s brillant, humorous, and provocative show, took the form of a grand installation in the large gallery space at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. In true Duchampian fashion, the artist offered his audience works of art that initially seemed to possess an element of play, but which in fact demonstrated a subtle and profound regard for the culture and political issues implied by Mao, who still holds immense sway as a historical figure and endlessly repeated Communist icon... Zhang knows that the fastest way to undermine power is to laugh at it. He created a very strong show by playing on the relentless ubiquity of Mao’s corpulent image in China. His show most often presented Mao’s image in negation-Material Mao (1991-1995) is the name of a series that portrays Mao as a negative image, in this case a sequence of frames outlining Mao’s silhouette. The materials used to cover the frames were numerous and inventive: brick, concrete, corn, fur, grass, soy sauce. Here Zhang nods his head in the direction of Western avant-garde practice; his preoccupation with materials expands the meaning of the series, so that Mao, or rather his absence, becomes the means for an experiment in formal application. Through repetition, the content of Mao’s form is rendered meaningless, enabling Zhang to investigate different textures. In a sly reversal, his treatment of Mao takes on purely aesthetic meaning. This is not to say that the show avoided political content. Yet the interest of Material Mao lies in its transformation of Mao’s image from an icon of over whelming political power to a neutral, or rather neutralized, engendered of form. The content of his image becomes a means of expression — the exact opposite of what happened, and still happens, in China, where Mao’s portrait is used to control. Zhang is clearly obsessed with Mao — as he says in an insightful interview with the show’s curator Lydia Yee, “I realized that even though I have left China more than five years before, psychologically I couldn’t eliminate Mao’s image from my mind.” But he wanted to walk away from his preoccupation, and in a personal way his show enacts the difficult process of devaluing a hugely powerful figure. What is interesting was how Zhang achieved the break. His art tends toward the interactive — Ping-pong Mao (1995) consisted of a regulation ping-pong table, with a large silhouette of Mao cut out of each half of the playing surface. The artist provided paddles and ball for people to play, and for this viewer, the experience of the game, played on an alternated surface, proved metaphorically telling — one had to hit the ball around the image, for otherwise it would pass through the cut-out space, stopping play. Here Zhang’s conceptual wit was acute — viewers could enjoy themselves even as they enacted the artist’s message. Two door pieces also demanded actinon on the part of audience. Front Door is a mixed-media installation with an audio tape of someone rhythmically knocking, a sound that punctuated the viewer’s overall experience of the show. Forging yet another connection between reality and artifice, Zhang took a series of photos of door locks and altered them on a computer, then printing the images in color with a laser printer. These locks, cut out and pasted up and applied to a genuine door (both door pieces served as actual entrances to working rooms in the museum), proved endlessly eloquent on reality, its perception, and one’s awareness of the imagined world as representative of, in Zhang’s words, “the gap between art and life.” According to the artist, in China “the door only keeps the wind out of the home and not the devil.” In this case the knocking demon revealed through keyhole was, once again, Mao. Yet Zhang does not always see his intrusiveness as comical. In Zhang’s Red Door, the audience peeked through a vertical crack separating two red door panels, decorated with laser-printed gold studs. One saw a videotape of Mao dancing with a beautiful woman dressed in the festival clothing of her ethnic-minority background. Later in the clip Mao is seen smoking, surrounded by a bevy of women, one of whom is lighting his cigarette. In light of recent biographies detailing Mao’s womanizing, the film ironically undermines Mao’s public images as a great man and virtuous leader. Red Door also subverts the tenet of his little red book that men and women were to be considered absolutely equal in a classless society (in point of fact, woman are still viewed as secondary in China, where Confucian tradition and its bias against the feminine remains powerful). With Red Door, Zhang has created a humorous but telling piece that uses historical footage and, by recontextualizing it, transforms the film into an acute criticism of Mao’s hypocrisy. Zhang’s Last Banquet (1989) occupied the wall between Front Door and Red Door. An exercise in cross-cultural blasphemy, the painting has been censored in America, where it was rejected for an exhibition as being offensive to Christians. All the banquet participants in this inspired parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper are Maos. The Christ Mao in the center is speaking into a microphone, a ceramic spittoon at his feet. Holding the little red book, the Judas Mao reaches for the Communist hammer, the sickle being held by the Mao behind him, while grains spill from his rice-bowl on the long table draped in red (the image is a reference to the extreme famines in China from 1959-1962, after the Great Leap Forward the year before). In the center background is a landscape seen across three windows; it depicts a portion of the Great Wall. The Mao faces are extraordinarily detailed — Zhang has taken different photos and reproduced them with a laser copier. At once a tour de force and a farce, Last Banquet reinterprets a great Western religious painting as an emblem of Mao’s egotism. Its audacity is compelling and, surprisingly, not without pathos. Here Zhang sees Mao for what he is: a charlatan posing as a messiah. The artist could only have made and shown this image outside of China, and as with his other efforts, he appropriates Western traditions to make his point. The Western viewer is surprised by the painting’s extreme gravitas. Here, somehow, the humor doesn’t translate, perhaps because the Last Supper possesses such resonance for the Western viewer. As a result, Mao’s devastation of a people and culture is expressed politically, but vicariously, through an image appropriated from another tradition. Zhang has painted a post-modern work of importance, criticizing one iconography through the use of another. He is much more aware, and not nearly so lighthearted, as a viewer might imagine.” – Zhang Hongtu at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, by Jonathan Goodman, Asia-Pacific Sculpture News, winter 1996, p58
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