Zhang Hongtu: Van Gogh/Bodhidarma

“Zhang Hongtu: Van Gogh/Bodhidharma” will open at Connecticut College on Friday, February 16, 2-4:30pm, featuring the Van Gogh-Bodhidharma 梵高–达摩 series (2007-2014) of internationally renowned, New York based Chinese artist Zhang Hongtu 张宏图. It consists of 39 ink paintings in total, “remaking” all of Vincent van Gogh’s extant self-portraits in the style of classical Zen portraits of Bodhidharma, the founding patriarch of Zen Buddhism. This will be the first time that this series has been exhibited together. The artist has also created a new video installation specifically for this show.

 

Zhang was born in Gansu in 1943 into a traditional Chinese Muslim family. He attended the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts in Beijing in the 1960s before and during the Cultural Revolution. He moved to New York in 1982 and has been living and working there for nearly four decades. Zhang belongs to the first generation of post-Cultural Revolution artists from mainland China who chose New York as their base and succeeded in breaking new paths, including prominent names such as Ai Weiwei 艾未未, Gu Wenda谷文达, Xu Bing 徐冰, and Cai Guoqiang 蔡国强. As one of the most senior and yet perhaps the most youthful spirited among the group, Zhang has been a crucial player in this movement where contemporary Chinese and American art, East and West, meet. His most recent solo exhibition was Zhang Hongtu, a major survey of his long creative career held at the Queens Museum, New York (2015-2016) and accompanied by an exhibition catalog Zhang Hongtu: Expanding Visions of a Shrinking World (Queens Museum/Duke University Press, 2015). His work was also featured in the recent exhibition Art and China after 1989: Theatre of the World at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017-2018).

 

Featured Photo: Painting of Van Gogh by Zhang Hongtu