Zhang Hongtu

Zhang Hongtu (Simplified Chinese: 张宏图; Traditional Chinese: 張宏圖; Wade-Giles: Chang Hung-t'u; Pinyin: Zhāng Hóngtú) (born 1943) is a Chinese artist based in New York City.

Zhang was born in Pingliang.

He works in a variety of media such as painting (sometimes with soy sauce), sculpture, collage, ceramics, digital imaging and installation.

His work explores the freedom to criticize the Chinese authorities afforded to an artist living in the West.

It also reflects on themes of authority and belief (specifically the power of iconic imagery)and cross-cultural 'East and West' connections.These themes are largely derived from his "outsider" standing as a Muslim in China and, after his move to the United States, as a Chinese citizen in the Western world.

He 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.

His 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.

From 1947 to 1950, with the Chinese civil war raging, Hongtu's father mobilized his family, moving them from Pingliang in the northwest to Shanghai, Suzhou, and Nanjing, and then north to Zhengzhou.

Before the communist defeat, Zhang Bingduo intended to escape with his family to Hong Kong, but was convinced to move to Beijing by a Muslim professor.

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

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.

However, their religious affiliation in an officially atheistic state made life increasingly difficult.

Bingduo was branded a Rightist in 1957.

And while he avoided being sent to a reeducation camp, Hongtu's mother lost her job and talk of religion disappeared within the household.

In 1958, Chairman Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward began and its effects were felt profoundly by the Zhang family.

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

He produced a mural with three revolutionary flags – one symbolizing the Great Leap Forward, a second symbolizing the People's Communes, and the third symbolizing the General Principle of Socialist Construction.

But when the Great Leap Forward failed as the result of economic mismanagement, famine plagued China.

Zhang Hongtu remembered: " we discovered all the hungry people, beggars from the country so skinny, with no clothes. Every single day, and you're so hungry yourself that you just couldn't sleep but so tires you can't wake up. We heard one thing from school and the newspapers but we saw something else from reality and we felt betrayed. You needed a scale to weigh out food to make sure there'd be some at the end of the month. I'd go with my father to the park to pick plants to eat."

In 1960, when 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 Hongtu began his professional art studies at Beijing's Central Academy of Arts and Crafts.

In 1966, Chairman Mao tried to redeem the failure of the Great Leap Forward by introducing a Cultural Revolution.

At the dawn of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Hongtu's art studies were terminated and political activities became a more central focus.

During the Cultural Revolution, trains were made available to students for travel and "linking up" with the people of China.

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

However, the government found the "linking up" program to be unmanageable and the program was ended.

So Hongtu and five friends, including artist Yu Youhan, used the historical "Long March" as a model, crossing the countryside by foot and using their art on behalf of the current political movement.

They marched north to the Jinggang Mountains in the Jiangxi province.

This place was where Mao's first organization activities for the Chinese Communist Party began.

From there, the group traveled to Mao's birthplace at Shaoshan, carrying flags and a portrait of Chairman Mao.

By the time they returned to Beijing, the Cultural Revolution had begun to have serious repercussions for the Zhang family.

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

He was then prohibited from painting Mao's portrait.

Looking back on his long march, Zhang Hongtu has said: "Nobody bothered me at that time about my family background. It was nice to see the landscape, so nice for a city boy. But after this trip, I changed a lot. The bad part is, I saw people kill each other, literally. I began to ask, 'Is this really the Cultural Revolution?' I saw people put so many books all together like a hill and then burn them. I saw so many poor people, it was beyond my imagination. The reality of it didn't fit my imagination of the Cultural Revolution. I got back and instead of being a participant, I became an 'escapist'."

In Beijing, his home was searched for materials against the revolutionary movement.

His trust in Mao and Mao's writings slowly turned into sentiments of betrayal.

At its outset, the Muslim Association was disbanded, greatly disillusioning Zhang Hongtu's father, who refused to re-accept his job when the Cultural Revolution finally ended in 1976.

In 1987 he took part in the founding of The Chinese United Overseas Artists Association, along with Li Shuang, Qu Leilei, Ai Weiwei.