Bounced out of the Bird’s Nest
Despite the smog, red tide, cheating at fireworks, fake ethnic minorities, a perfect child lip-synching, Spielberg’s absence and the blood of millions of Burmese and Africans on the wrong side of the Chinese payroll, Beijing put on a pretty good show with the Olympics, I thought.
The one Chinese out of three billion who may not have enjoyed the fortnight is Zhang Hongtu, whose painting “Bird’s Nest, in the Cubist Style” was blocked from exhibition at the German Embassy in the Chinese capital and from its planned reproduction in Chinese Vogue. It was “too political”, as opposed to “not pretty enough”, like the little girl who really did sing the anthem at the Games’ opening ceremony.
Zhang’s depiction of the National Stadium includes bits of the Bird’s Nest structure, the words “Sacred Olympic Torch”, “One World, One Dream” and “Family, Joy, Happiness” in Chinese, the numeral “8″ and, uh-oh, the words “Tibet” and “human right” in English.
Well, I mean, no wonder.
So Zhang and his painting sat out the Games back home in New York, where the Gansu native has lived since 1982. By way of compensation he’s got Sotheby’s “Contemporary Art Asia” auction coming up in the Big Apple on September 17, and a pair of his “traditional Chinese landscapes” rendered in the styles of Van Gogh and Cézanne are expected to bring as much as $60,000 each.
The New York sale features many artists proffering the usual array of bouquets and brickbats for the Politburo, lots of digital manipulation and textural experiments, a few too many cute pictures, even if they are ironic, and the odd abstract. I don’t see any real stand-outs in the catalogue, but it does give me a chance to get up to speed on Zhang Hongtu, whose “Self-Portrait, in the Style of the old Masters” is shown here.
I suspect Zheng’s shtick plays better in the West, where he quickly went Warhol with satirical Mao portraits. The “Pop Quaker Oats Cans” below are almost as famous these days as Andy’s soup, but when the pop is coming from a Chinese, you get extra mileage thanks to the question, “Is there any difference between Eastern and Western art?”
Ming vases in the shape of Coke bottles and soy sauce as a painting medium tend to make art critics use words like “humour” and “playful” and, to be sure, Zheng has a bunch of goofy jokes on his website. But he’s put some serious thought into stuff, having recovered from a bout of Warhol doubt. At one stage Zheng too believed painting was dead, and he moved on to empty spaces that “suggested” imagery. Fortunately he’s fully rehabilitated now.
I placed the term “traditional Chinese landscapes” in quotes because they’re not landscapes at all, contrary to what I thought.
I feel dumb now, but I discovered in reading the reams of online articles about Zheng that the old Chinese paintings didn’t depict landscapes, just fanciful, dreamed-up landscapes.
Nothing of the sort exists in reality. I actually thought they did — those towering limestone hills, etc, but no.
These old paintings are known as shan shui, meaning literally “mountains and water” and figuratively, uh, dreamed-up landscapes. They are intended as illustrated travel guides: you wander through them, perspective be damned. Not even the cubists came close to this.
Zheng has recreated some of the best-known classic watercolours in very occidetal oils and in the styles of three Europeans who adored Asian art — Van Gogh, Cézanne and Monet — complete with their rich palettes, unlike the colourless originals. Ni Zan’s hills meet Monet’s water lilies, Cézanne’s tonal blocks are framed by Dong Qichang’s calligraphy and seals.
“Shitao — Van Gogh #7″ transforms the 17th-century artist-monk’s mountain sanctuary with Vincent’s layers of shivering light. That may be Shitao meditating in the picture.
