A two-person exhibition featuring new and recent works by Beijing-based painter Ji Dachun and New York-based multimedia artist Zhang Hongtu.

Zhang Hongtu is a leading figure from an older generation of avant-garde Chinese artists. A long-time resident of New York, he employs his active imagination to lampoon the branding of China and its cultural history in the international art market. Zhang includes for exhibition signature multiples that incorporate historically-specific material processes with recognizable icons from the age of globalization: a cast-bronze McDonald’s value-meal, blue-and-white porcelain Cola bottles, and soy-sauce silhouettes of Beijing’s Forbidden City. This artwork, as well as large-scale digital prints mounted on scrolls combining photos of crowded bicycle traffic and traditional ink painting, uses pointed humor to engage the cross-directional cultural internalization that has characterized both China and America in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Ji Dachun lives and works as an artist in Beijing. He has exhibited extensively at international art fairs as well as festivals including the first Guangzhou Triennial, 2002, and the Shanghai Biennale, 2000. Recent international solo shows include the Posco Art Museum, Korea; Aura Gallery, China; and Base Gallery, Tokyo. Recent group shows include Democracy Forever, at Plum Blossoms New York, 2004; Images among Images, at the Shenzhen Art Museum, Shenzhen, China, 2003; and Another Modernism, at the Haus der Kulturen, Berlin, 1997. This is his first solo exhibition in the United States.

Born in Gansu Province in 1943, Zhang Hongtu left China for New York in 1982. There, he studied at the Art Students League and has since emerged as one of the premier artists working out of the Chinese Diaspora. Recent exhibitions include the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey; the Queens Museum of Art; and The Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, Illinois. Museum collections include the Bronx Museum of Art; the National Museum of Art, Beijing; and the New Museum for Contemporary Art. This is his first time showing at Plum Blossoms New York.