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“Trained in Beijing's prestigious Central Academy of Arts and Crafts, Zhang Hongtu studied Chinese calligraphy, traditional ink painting, Buddhist art, and socialist realist art in China. During his early years in New York, he began to "reverse" himself in his painting: by portraying the back of his head on a canvas he gained a point of view that had always evaded him. But soon the subject of reversal changed from himself to a famous icon. When he painted a Mao cap onto the Quaker Oats man on an oatmeal carton in 1987, he almost accidentally created perhaps the first work of Chinese political pop, which would become an extremely influential artistic genre in China in the early to mid-nineties.” – 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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