#zhang hongtu

[chessboxingstreetwear]

Zhang Hongtu ‘Mai Dang Lao’

[psikonauti]

Zhang Hongtu (Chinese, b. 1943)

Mi Youren - Monet, 1999

oil on canvas

[yama-bato]

Zhang Hongtu

Bison and Cranes, After the Emperor Huizong of Song 907 Years Later, 2019 Oil and acrylic on canvas

Courtesy Tina Keng Gallery.

[lux-vitae]

Fan Kuan - Van Gogh by Zhang Hongtu (1998)

[nervous-objects]

[honeysuckling]

[brooklynmuseum]

With its bronze, intricate decorative elements, surely a Happy Meal in the Shang Dynasty couldn’t be on the value menu.

In Mai Dang Lao (McDonald’s), a hamburger box, fries container, fork, and knife are cast in bronze and adorned with traditional Chinese motifs like the taotie mask, typically featured on ancient ritual bronze vessels used in worship of the ancestors. 

Here it is combined with the iconic logo of the fast-food giant, transforming the “Happy Meal” into a Shang-dynasty artifact. The Asian American artist Zhang Hongtu, a leader of the “Political Pop” movement in contemporary Chinese art, lives in Queens, New York, after emigrating from China in the 1980s. By creatively juxtaposing ancient China with contemporary America, and ritual art with consumer culture, Zhang whimsically critiques systems of power. 

📷 Zhang Hongtu (Chinese, born 1943). Mai Dang Lao (McDonald's), 2002. Cast Bronze, box of fries. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the artist, 2014.82a-d. © artist or artist's estate

[goodmemory]

Ongoing Shan Shui - Zhang Hongtu

[sangshensworld]

12. Zhang Hongtu <Early Spring> 1998

When I was researching Guo Xi’s work, I found Zhang Hongtu using Van Gogh’s painting style to recreate Guo Xi’s mountain and water painting, I think it is interesting to painting traditional Chinese landscape in a new way.

[robingoodfellow]

Zhang Hongtu, Mai Dang Lao (McDonald's), 2002

[junowyear3]

03.08.22

Popular Culture Lecture Three

Characteristics of a fully functional creative in today’s society:

Working collaboratively

Appropriating what already exist

Simulating the “Real”

Hybridizing cultural influences

Mixing media

Layering images

Mixing codes (A code as a system of signs and a set of conventions for how the signs are to be used)

Recontextualising the familiar

Intertextualising signs (The shaping of one sign’s meaning by other signs)

Confronting the Gaze

Using Dissonance

Constructing new identities

Adapting literary devices to visual art- Using narratives, creating metaphors, using irony and parody

Understanding of cultural capital (from previous lecture):

Gender- a construct that differentiates according to both antagonistic and complementary principles- highly complex, differentiated and vital symbolic order. Masculine domination as a prime example of symbolic violence- kind of gentle, invisible, pervasive violence exercised through the everyday practices of social life. Symbolic violence describes a type of non-physical violence manifested in the power differential between social groups. Cultural Violence- represents the existence of prevailing or prominent social norms that make direct and structural violence seem “natural” or “right” Symbolic Capital- comes with social position and affords prestige which leads to others paying attention to you. All parties are complicit in the structures that exist. Cultural processed can erect barriers to services and resources, where race and gender bias compromise access to justice. Abuse culture- framework of violence that we live in, includes rape culture. Cultures can encourage and permit violence to exist as a response to various environmental obstacles. 

How do we position ourselves?

Modernism- elitist towards the media and popular culture. Fosters a value for high culture. Modernists critique culture or politics from the outside- you are superior or judgmental. Postmodernism- suggests that you cannot critique from the outside. Accommodates popularism/ popular culture. Complicates the division between high and low culture, elite and mass consciousness, makes it impossible to occupy a critical viewpoint on culture from outside or above it.

Images not only produced and consumed. They circulate within cultures and across cultural boundaries. World-wide communications structure and multinational corporations. Globalisation, convergence, synergy. 

Cultural Imperialism- refers to how an ideology, a politics or a way of life is exported into other territories through the export of cultural products. 

Hongtu Zhang- historical with popular culture- repurposing, appropriation

Li Lihong- sculptural hybrids

Ai Wei Wei- neolithic ceramics, excavated, valuable- devalues them by painting them. Commercial culture devalues. Crossing cultures

[chessboxingstreetwear]

Zhang Hongtu - ‘Fan Kuan—Van Gogh’

[thunderstruck9]

Zhang Hongtu (Chinese, b. 1943), Shitao - Van Gogh #7, 2004. Oil on canvas, 183 x 82 cm.

[yama-bato]

Zhang Hongtu's Water Painting RE-MAKE OF MA YUAN'S WATER ALBUM (780 YEARS LATER)

Zhang Hongtu, MY-H, Oil on Canvas 50" x 72" 2008

[sinetheta]

Quaker Oats Mao. Zhang Hongtu (张宏图). 1987.

Zhang Hongtu (张宏图) is a Chinese artist who graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts. In his art, Zhang often combines eastern and western ideas, styles, and techniques in his art. Zhang left China for the United States in the early 1980s and currently resides in New York. 

In Quaker Oats Mao, Zhang criticizes the ubiquity and power of Chairman Mao Zedong’s image in China by imposing iconic features of Mao, such as hair and clothing, onto the Quaker Oats man. This pop art of Zhang’s was not well received by neither China, where Mao’s image was almost sacred, nor the Quaker Oats company, which was anti-Communist. 

Follow sinθ magazine for more daily posts about Sino arts and culture.

[bm-asian-art]

Mai Dang Lao (McDonald's), Zhang Hongtu, 2002, Brooklyn Museum: Asian Art

Fast-food containers and knife and fork, recreated in bronze with decorative elements in relief incorporating both the golden arches of McDonalds and the Taotie mask motif of ancient Chinese bronzes. a: sandwich container b: fries container c: fork d: knife © Hongtu Zhang Size: box of fries: 7 1/4 × 4 3/4 × 2 1/4 in. (18.4 × 12.1 × 5.7 cm) hamburger box closed: 3 1/2 × 4 5/8 × 4 3/4 in. (8.9 × 11.7 × 12.1 cm) fork: 1 × 3/4 × 6 3/16 in. (2.5 × 1.9 × 15.7 cm) knife: 5/8 × 1/8 × 5 13/16 in. (1.6 × 0.3 × 14.8 cm) Medium: Cast Bronze

https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/217342