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“Here Zhang Hongtu reveals his fundamental technique to destroy the Mao myth, which is to turn a sacred icon into "nothing." In this sense, what Zhang Hongtu intends to create are not counter-monuments but anti- monuments. ...... An anti- monument...negates the very notion of a monument as a supreme embodiment of history and memory. Like his hollowed Mao images, Zhang Hongtu's Studs, ...transforms a serious political symbol into a joke. The artist has retained (and to some extent exaggerated) the shining red door panels of an imperial gate in the Forbidden City, but has replaced its glamorous, golden bosses with ugly metal rivets, which are like rows of phalluses in various degrees of inadequate erection.” – TRANSIENCE Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century, by Wu Hung, The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, 1999
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