The Hand That Signed The Canvas
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday October 21, 2006
It's hard maintaining integrity in a commercialised art world, so Zhou Tiehai decided to bend the rules to suit himself.
MANY ARTISTS FEEL they are unappreciated as contemporaries of lesser talent find acclaim and fortune. This was the case for Shanghai artist Zhou Tiehai in the early 1990s, when the world was discovering Chinese contemporary art. When the art world didn't warm to his early endeavours - paintings and collages on newspapers and sometimes violent performance art pieces - he abandoned the artistic life in disgust and worked in advertising.But the graduate of Shanghai University's School of Fine Arts couldn't bear watching from the sidelines as the Western art industry promoted what he considered to be mediocre works by Chinese artists peddling cliches of communism. So he embarked on a bold - some say cynical - plan to make himself famous by exposing the commercialism of the art world.While his contemporaries were typically producing works laden with Communist Party symbols and icons - Mao Zedong, Red Guards, Tiananmen Square - Zhou produced fake Western art and news magazine covers announcing himself as the rising superstar of Chinese art, a series that made it to the Venice Biennale. He made a short film in which a group of artists plot to build their own airport in Shanghai to make it easier for foreign buyers to jet in. And instead of a "Chinese" motif, he adopted an icon of American tobacco advertising, Joe Camel."A lot of Chinese artists were painting Mao and other political icons and I thought that was just too simple ... and they were doing that to impress Westerners about how Chinese art should be," Zhou (pronounced "Joe") says. But those artists were merely copying what Russian artists had already done - painting Stalin with Coca Cola cans. "It was nothing new." Zhou, 40, says he was looking for a gimmick, a signature with which he could brand himself, and he found it in the pages of a Rolling Stone magazine: Joe Camel, the cartoon character used to promote Camel cigarettes, which the anti-smoking lobby alleged was designed to appeal to children. (Under pressure from US Congress and lobby groups, the tobacco company ended Joe Camel's life in 1997.) The camel became Zhou's signature after his first series of paintings in 1996 in which he transposed the camel's head onto Western masterpieces; Joe Camel's friendly face on top of the Mona Lisa's body, for example. "I didn't want Western audiences to have a fixed image or icon of what is Chinese contemporary art," he says. In a nod to Andy Warhol, Zhou stopped painting altogether. It was cheaper and more efficient to hire poor art students to copy the printouts of masterpieces he had digitally altered on his computer. This left him more time to brainstorm ideas and network with gallery owners, collectors and journalists. Zhou insists that being famous and making art is "easy" but deflects the question of whether his apparent cynicism is a cover for an intense competitiveness. He demurs when pressed about what Joe Camel represents, either because of language difficulties (he speaks English but we are talking through a translator) or perhaps because he is reluctant to be too prescriptive when enthusiastic art writers can be relied on to ascribe their own meanings to his work. A Shanghai newspaper described Zhou as an "elusive genius whose sagacity and humour permeate" his work. A Shanghai curator called him a "wave-maker and trendsetter" because he "understands that historical development always entails the possibility of interaction and co-mingling between contradictory sides".Zhou says it doesn't matter what people say, just as long as they take notice. He says art has become a consumer product. "People buy art like they're going to a designer clothing boutique. They know a brand and without thinking too much they want to buy it." Zhou says he is not trying to change the system. He just wants to be part of it. "I'm a manufacturer [of contemporary art] and the difference is I'm upfront about it." More and more people are buying Zhou's "brand" - he has exhibited in New York, Tokyo, Germany, Portugual, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Spain and now in Melbourne - and his paintings have fetched more than $US100,000 ($133,000).Earlier this year, the Shanghai Art Museum honoured him with a solo exhibition in its main hall, its most prestigious space. The retrospective of 40 works was the first show for a contemporary Shanghai artist, breaking the stranglehold that Beijing has long had on contemporary art.His latest work has Joe Camel inserted into modern and contemporary art classics. So the Camel peers slyly or shyly over his trademark sunglasses atop the striped shirt of Picasso and gets to have sex with the porn star and Italian politician Cicciolina (aka Illona Staller), as his head replaces that of Jeff Koons in the naked self-portraits with Koons's former wife.Zhou won't even be designing his paintings in his latest project. Along with a Swiss art dealer, Pierre Huber, who established the Art & Public gallery in 1984, focusing on minimalist and contemporary art in Geneva, he is trying to mount an Asia-Pacific art fair in Shanghai next year that will somehow differ from all the other art fairs that have sprung up around China's big cities.. Zhou and Huber agree that the purpose of an art fair, in which commercial galleries gather under one roof, is to sell paintings, but maintain that their art fair will be different, better, because they will work only with people who are, ironically, "not focused on selling art by the square metre".
© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald