| Virtualchina.coM Breaking Free, Flying High: Zhang Hongtu's Journey from Maoism to Modern Art By ALEXA OLESEN Zhang Hongtu has come a long way from his youth as a diehard Maoist, roving the Chinese countryside whipping up enthusiasm for the Cultural Revolution. Now living in New York, Zhang is haunted by those days, and making a career of his artistic efforts to purge himself of those memories and acts. "I am trying to unbind my feet," says Zhang Hongtu. The Chinese conceptual artist's feet are enclosed in hiking boots that look perfectly cozy and, if anything, a little big. His feet aren't actually bound. They were never broken turned in and tightly wrapped with cloth so they might be called "Golden Lilies", as were the feet of many women in pre-modern China. No, Zhang Hongtu's feet are fine. He's simply using the metaphor of bound feet to explain how making works of art has helped to liberate his mind from the Maoist thought control that pervaded his youth. "Chinese society used to think foot-binding was good, so parents did it to their daughters. Eventually those girls believed in it and they would wrap their feet themselves. They internalized society's standards."
Mao Murals What Zhang Hongtu internalized, by contrast, were the strictures on thought that defined his youth in China. Born in 1943, Zhang was six years old when Mao Zedong founded the Chinese People's Republic of China. With his father as the Vice President of the Chinese Islamic Association in Beijing, Zhang was able to witness in close detail the political turmoil and upheavals that soon followed. "I grew up in Mao's era and, of course, trusted Mao completely," Zhang said. "Looking back I am impressed by how efficient they were at brainwashing people. I was 100% part of the revolutionary machine." Although his intellectual family background prevented Zhang from being able to paint murals of Mao or become a Red Guard (the ultra-patriotic teen militias who carried out the Cultural Revolution), Zhang threw himself heart and soul into the revolution. He was a convert, a zealot, a true believer who thought his efforts would actually help to liberate Taiwan, Hong Kong, and even African Americans in the United States. But something happened on the way to the liberation. In his middle 20's, while travelling around China with other young people during the Cultural Revolution, Zhang -saw sights that didn't square with the Mao's vision of a people's utopia.
Political Pop After this trauma, Zhang was reluctant to return to Beijing, China's political center. But he had no choice, so he returned, and for the next six years he studied art, -married, and began working. But he was increasingly bitter and resentful of how -completely his life was controlled by others. So, in 1982, at age 38, Zhang --fled to the U.S. to -study at New York's Art Student League. He found his new setting to be truly liberating, --and he has in New York ever since. "I wanted to forget everything about China," he said, pushing something large and invisible away from his body. "It was a nightmare." His flight to the U.S. allowed him to escape China physically, but psychically was a different story. It wasn't long before China surfaced powerfully in his art. He began with the object of his great obsession: Mao Zedong. He began to use Chairman Mao's figure in a series called Material Mao, which made Zhang famous as a leading figure in the contemporary art style now known as Chinese Political --Pop. He cut the distinctive block headed image of Mao Zedong out of different materials, -from fur to burlap to a ping pong table. Kimchi Chanel Art, for Zhang, has been a means of self discovery and liberation for the past decade. He has experimented widely in many media and styles, while maintaining a distinct personality through his work that is playful and pointedly witty. Most of his pieces deliver a punch line that can explode either immediately or upon careful examination. Whether it's foul smelling Kim Chi in a Chanel bottle, or Chairman Mao taking the place of Jesus and every one of his disciples in a takeoff of The Last Supper, the work, like the man, is irreverent and intense. Zhang is dressed in jeans, a sweater, and, of course, hiking boots. He's in his Brooklyn studio, an industrial space cluttered with canvases and photos and papers. It -was a hay loft a century ago, he says. As he talks he tips his chair back so he can see-saw--on the chairs' back legs while his arms gesticulate. One of the pioneer members of a growing diaspora of mainland Chinese artists living in the West, Zhang is now one of the group's elders. He's now lived in New York --longer than a good many "New Yorkers." His white hair and fluent English attest to his -long stay here.
Mountain &
Water "Everybody has a reason to label you with these different titles," he says. "I don't want to deal with these titles anymore." Instead he wants to mix things up, which is just what he is doing with his newest project. Zhang is now producing a series of hybrid paintings that are Impressionist interpretations of traditional Chinese Shan Shui (pronounced shawn shway, meaning "mountain and water") paintings from the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties. Each of these "in the style of" paintings are actually in the style of two artists, instead of one. One painting will be in the style of Van Gogh and Shi Tao, for example; another will be in the styles of Dong Qichang and Cezanne. But the paintings don't just juxtapose-- they actually conjoin the two radically different styles into onestyle: -Zhang's. This act of cross cultural pollination leaves some art purists unamused. "Impressionism experts and scholars of classical Chinese painting don't like my work," Zhang --admits. "They say 'How can you do that?'"
Self Discovery Indeed, Zhang has spent many hours at the Metropolitan Museum of Art examining masterpieces, so that he could faithfully mimic and merge their styles. He jokes that his paintings are forgeries, but says the paintings must look authentic to effectively "influence the visual memory that people have of Chinese painting." Zhang says each part of his oeuvre - his Mao cut-outs, his Duchampian sculptures, his Shan Shui paintings - are a record of self discovery. More specifically, he says, his works record the unbinding of his mind from Maoism. "It's almost 100 percent natural now", he says. "Almost." |