Zhang Hongtu - "Political Pop" (late 1980s To 1990s)

"Political Pop" (late 1980s To 1990s)

In 1987, Zhang Hongtu took brush and paint to a Quaker Oats box. One day, while eating oatmeal for breakfast, it occurred to him that there was a resemblance between Mr. Quaker and Chairman Mao. The idea of Chairman Mao’s presence being so inescapable, even in his life in the United States, and that with just a few brushstrokes, the face of an American icon could become a Chinese icon, marks an important shift in Hongtu’s artistic development. This was the birth of his Long Live Chairman Mao Series

This particular artwork became one of the first of China’s “political pop” movement that helped launch Contemporary Chinese painting into its current popularity. "Political Pop" refers to artworks that appropriate the visual tropes of propaganda (specifically the Cultural Revolution) and reworks them into he Western "pop art" style. It marked the beginning of what Jerome Silbergeld notes as “a long romance between Chinese and Western icons” in Zhang Hongtu’s work.

Shortly after the Events at Tiananmen Square in 1989, Zhang Hongtu painted the Last Banquet, which satirized Chairman Mao's deification and the revered writings of the Little Red Book. A senatorial group sponsored an exhibition in the Russell Rotunda in Washington D.C. as a response to the events at Tiananmen Square and Zhang Hongtu submitted Last Banquet for the exhibition. Ironically, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts declared the artwork as "sacrilegious" and barred it from the exhibition. According to Silbergeld, "Zhang had come full circle, censored at an American exhibition protesting censorship in China." Zhang pulled out of the exhibit and his fellow artists followed his lead. Consequently, though originally priced at $4000, Last Banquet was sold five years later for $50,000.

Both the Long Live Chairman Mao Series and the Last Banquet set the stage for his later works, which reached back into his personal history. Many of these works took influences from his experiences as a Muslim outsider in China and his "otherness" in the United States. Zhang's works reflect on authority and belief; about the power of icons. His icons are meant to reach across cultural boundaries and to "offend all audiences equally." About the walls between cultures, Zhang Hongtu has said, "In my art, I try to make a way through the wall, to put a door, a hole in the wall, by using Western art with my own art. There's a Chinese saying, 'You can't breed a horse with a cow'. My work is the opposite, like 'Daring to breed the horse with the cow'.

Chairman Mao was not the only cultural icon portrayed in Zhang's artwork. In a series of cut-outs from the early 1990s, he also includes images of Buddha, the crucifixion of Christ, the cross, the holy trinity, ionic columns, traditional Chinese book bound with thread, and the Great Wall. In his deconstruction of cultural icons, Zhang Hongtu has used cutouts and contrast. He cuts images out, turning positives into negatives and solids into voids. In so doing, the artist criticizes commonly held value judgements of high and low and the distinction between them. These unfilled images are surrounded by materials such as oil, rice, grass, MSG, soy sauce, cement, nails and corns etc.. The conflicting image of emptiness and basic, raw surrounding substances have attributed in his success in creating tension. This tension has caused viewers to think about the contrasting relationships between 'high and low', 'common and grand' and 'reality and illusion.'

Importantly, Zhang Hongtu does not provide answers to the issues his artworks raise about globalization, 'East and West', 'high and low', and elite culture from the museum to mass culture. Instead, they provoke the viewer to question and to think about the issues from different cultural and societal perspectives.