Curated by Luchia Meihua Lee
Both Zhang Hongtu’s political Pop of the 1980s and his recent canvases treat images of Mao Zedong, Chinese art, and Western painting like readymades, while somehow not surrendering to irony. The Queens-based Chinese artist’s first survey in the US will span more than sixty years of production. Early works include sketchy landscape studies and portraits of peasants that Zhang made as a student in Beijing and in service to Communist Party messaging, respectively. Not long after moving to New York in 1982, he began incorporating the once-omnipresent silhouette of Mao into a variety of media—Ping-Pong tables, Quaker Oats containers, a reproduction of The Last Supper, and so on. This brazen appropriation of China’s secular deity by a native reverberated in artistic circles and influenced a period of explicitly political artmaking. A catalogue boasting twelve texts by specialists in the field aims to contextualize Zhang’s remarkable practice and to affirm his legacy.
