Early life 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.
The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution 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 1966, Chairman Mao tried to redeem the failure of the Great Leap Forward by introducing a
Cultural Revolution. 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.
Art education within the context of the Cultural Revolution 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. 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. Looking back on the Cultural Revolution, Zhang Hongtu has said, "I had to criticize my own painting... One friend who was so good toward me but really was just spying checked out my diary without telling me, to see how badly I hated the Communist Party. He found nothing and said so, but I was so hurt. After that, I couldn't write anything. That was the worst result of the Cultural Revolution. To this day, people don't trust each other, don't think about the future, just think about themselves and find security only in making money. That's hard to change now, and most people in my generation just don't want to talk about the Cultural Revolution." Although Hongtu's education was brought to an end in 1966, his class still officially graduated and was sent to the countryside near
Shijiazhuang to work in the rice fields. The last two years they spend in the fields, they were allowed to produce art on Sundays and stored their painting tools and materials in the baskets used for collecting cow dung. They became known as the "Dung Basket School of Painting." In 1972, the class was assembled and given their diplomas – belatedly. A year after receiving his diploma, Zhang Hongtu was assigned work in the Beijing Jewelry Import-Export Company.
Transition to the United States After Zhang Hongtu was assigned to work with the Beijing Jewelry Import-Export Company, he spent nine years doing professional jewelry design. In 1981, Zhang suggested to his supervisors that they send him to the Buddhist cave paintings at
Dunhuang to gather design ideas for jewelry making. He 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. In 1979, he joined the "Contemporaries" art group,
Tongdai Ren. Their group was the first to exhibit their works at the National Art Gallery in June 1980 and included mostly landscapes and portraits. The attention he received for his works at the exhibition led Zhang to request permission to change jobs, but his file would not be released by the Jewelry Company. For the sake of his work, Zhang Hontu resolved to leave the country. In three days, the jewelry design company gave him permission to travel to New York City and study at the
Art Students League. It was two years before Zhang Hongtu's family was able to follow him to the United States. He worked construction jobs, painting walls for a meager $50 per day. It took two years for him to sell two paintings, the second painting providing some encouragement to the struggling artist for its $1800 pay check by the
World Bank in Washington, D.C. But Zhang Hongtu's career in the Western world didn't really take off until 1987, when he painted a portrait of Chairman Mao onto a Quaker Oats box; an act that would eventually transform into part of Hongtu's famous
Long Live Chairman Mao Series. =="Political Pop" (late 1980s to 1990s)==