25 Facts About Zhang Hongtu

Zhang Hongtu was born on 1943 and is a Chinese artist based in New York City.

Zhang Hongtu's work explores the freedom to criticize the Chinese authorities afforded to an artist living in the West.

Zhang Hongtu studied at the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts in Beijing.

Zhang Hongtu was born in 1943 into a Muslim family in Pingliang, 100 miles northwest of Xi'an.

Zhang Hongtu's family was constantly on the move however, so that Hongtu never quite belonged to any of the places he moved.

Zhang Hongtu's father, Zhang Bingduo, was a devout Muslim and traveled throughout China to start schools in the Arabic language.

In Beijing, the members of the Zhang Hongtu family were outsiders.

Zhang Hongtu's father worked various jobs for the new government, including the Minority Affairs Association, the Xinhua News Agency, the Central Broadcasting Administration, and eventually he became the vice president of the National Muslim Association.

From that period, Zhang Hongtu remembered being asked to create a mural at his junior high school.

In 1960, when Zhang Hongtu was sixteen years old, he began his studies at the high school attached to Beijing's prestigious Central Academy of Arts.

However, in 1964, the school was declared "corrupt" by Chairman Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, and Zhang Hongtu began his professional art studies at Beijing's Central Academy of Arts and Crafts.

Zhang Hongtu used the opportunity to travel west to Xinjiang and then to Guangzhou.

Zhang Hongtu was criticized for his bad family background and his interest in Western art.

Zhang Hongtu found nothing and said so, but I was so hurt.

In 1981, Zhang Hongtu suggested to his supervisors that they send him to the Buddhist cave paintings at Dunhuang to gather design ideas for jewelry making.

Zhang Hongtu has suggested that the twenty-nine days he spent in Dunhuang making copies of the paintings became very important to his later artworks.

Zhang Hongtu did most of his artwork on Sunday evenings, dabbling in still-life drawings, landscapes, and paintings from models.

Zhang Hongtu worked construction jobs, painting walls for a meager $50 per day.

In 1987, Zhang Hongtu took brush and paint to a Quaker Oats box.

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.

Zhang Hongtu's works reflect on authority and belief; about the power of icons.

Zhang Hongtu began producing oil paintings in the late 1990s, using compositions of Chinese landscapes and executed them in the styles of European Impressionists.

Repainting Shanshui is a series that Zhang Hongtu began in 1998 to explore the parody of values and conventions of Chinese and Western art.

In 1987, Zhang Hongtu first took his paintbrush to a Quaker Oats box, changing the iconic Western figure into the iconic Chinese figure of Chairman Mao.

Zhang Hongtu transplanted the omnipresent image of Chairman Mao into a parody Western logo.