The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Zhou Tiehai’s work over the last decade has developed largely in China’s most cosmopolitan, speculative and dramatically transformed city of Shanghai. Known as the ‘Paris of the East’, it is perhaps not surprising that his major painting project ‘Desserts’, an element of which is featured in APT7, is based on French gastronomy and culinary practice. More than any other city on mainland China, Shanghai is marked by art, commerce, political reform and social tolerance as the portal for cultural exchange, and where the systems and strategies of North American and European models of consumer culture have first taken root. An ingredient of that consumer culture is the art market, with its networks of galleries, collectors and dealers, museum curators, and allegiances between promotion, marketing and reputations. Curator and writer Hou Hanru has referred to Shanghai as ‘a kind of surprisingly efficient combination of socialist and free-market capitalist values’. 1 Since the early 2000s, Zhou Tiehai’s conceptual projects have addressed, parodied and laid bare the machinations of this market system through a language of appropriation, cultural cliché and pastiche. Perhaps his best-known work is an ongoing series of airbrushed paintings that first appeared in the late 1990s, which insert the iconic figure of ‘Joe Camel’ — the logo for American Camel cigarettes — into popular and well-known examples of Western portraiture, from Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Del Sarto, to Goya and Ingres. The seamless conflation of high art iconography with mass-produced commercial crassness at first appeared as a deadpan take on familiar Duchampian antics. Within the dynamics of Chinese contemporary art, however, these and subsequent works activated significantly different, cultural, historical and trans-political associations to those that had played out in the early avant-gardes in Europe and the United States. A particular phenomenon of contemporary Chinese art over the last two decades has been its apparent pyrrhic rise to international attention and market success. Within a very compressed period, younger Chinese artists have adopted, adapted and re-invented aspects and strategies of the twentieth-century avant-garde from the ‘readymade’ and Dada, to Pop and performance-based crypto-shamanism. This historical and stylistic mélange has seen a remarkable and highly profitable market environment develop for contemporary Chinese art, which fuses post-Maoist, Cultural Revolution and anti-regime politics with familiar stylistic parameters. The formula readily aligns with the tastes of collectors and some exhibition organisers who wish to infuse an otherwise international style with a frisson of ‘authentic’, anti-authoritarian politics. Zhou Tiehai has deliberately and consciously avoided this tendency while paradoxically bathing in its afterglow. Conscious of the desire to see ‘Chinese-ness’ in the art of Chinese artists by collectors and markets outside of China, concomitant with the perceived ‘foreign- ness’ of contemporary idioms inside of China, Zhou has deftly exploited both positions to launch his ironic visual repertoire of parody, appropriation and pastiche. This is conceived by the artist and outsourced to a small army of assistants. Zhou’s ongoing ‘Desserts’ series refers to a characteristically French tradition of naming desserts after various social roles and occupations. It features five separate components so far: ‘Le diplomate’, ‘Le ministre’, ‘Le caroleuse’, ‘Le sabotajnik’ and ‘Le juge’, with each component comprised of a large group of small-scale hand-painted canvases. ‘Le juge’ consists of 158 paintings. Appearing like a montage, the various groups of small paintings appear initially as a random selection of advertising images, close-ups of food, nineteenth-century prints and assorted visual miscellany. There is, however, a circuitous logic and historical reference schema embedded within the apparent randomness of the work, exemplified in ‘Le juge’. In addition to fine examples of French cuisine, there are visual traces of French political history; subversive literature (Sacher-Masoch) 2 ; the satirical prints of Honoré Daumier; references to scandals such as the Dreyfus affair 3 with Émile Zola’s open letter to the French president, ‘J’accuse’ of 1898; and popular French entertainment institutions such as the Folies Bergère as well as hints of erotica. The consistently amateur-production-line look of these many paintings produces a cumulative effect of image overload, emulating the manner in which visual information is now received, often without context, via electronic distribution. Like a Google image bank, the fragments create their own internal meta-language, independent of context and specific meaning. Zhou Tiehai’s strategy is to create a collision–collusion effect between images that confuse and confound conventional histories, categories and orders of knowledge and information — not unlike the spiralling, sprawling network of imagery and ideas that informs the production and reception of contemporary art and culture in twenty- first-century China. David Burnett 1 Hou Hanru, ‘Mr Camel, the most faithful portrait of Shanghai today’, <www.shanghartgallery.com/galleryarchive/texts/id/440> , Seoul, 11 September 2006. 2 Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch (1836–95) was an Austrian writer and journalist. He was known as a utopian thinker who espoused socialist and humanist ideals in his fiction and non-fiction. The novel Venus in Furs (1869) is his only book available in English. The term masochism is derived from his name. 3 The Dreyfus Affair was a French political crisis of the late 1890s centred on the conviction of the Jewish military officer, Alfred Dreyfus, for treason for allegedly selling military secrets to the Germans. Émile Zola wrote a letter titled ‘J’accuse’, published in the newspaper L’Aurore . in which he attacked the army for covering up its mistaken conviction of Dreyfus, after further evidence came to light implicating the real culprit, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. ZHOU TIEHAI Cry, laugh, get rich 218