O Zhang interviewed in New York City

January 13, 2005

• What influences in your childhood made you become an artist?

‣ Since seven, I went to the Children’s Palace which it is a place for children to study art. I learned drawing, painting, and printmaking. After, I went to high school at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. So, I did calligraphy and Chinese and mural painting, but mainly I trained in watercolor and oil painting. After, I went to the Central Academy of Art in Beijing. It is difficult to apply, and I was the first person from the South to get into the Academy in ten years. It was very competitive. Also, the Academy’s style in the north is slightly different from the South. Maybe this is why it was so difficult to get in for people from the South. I was very isolated by my classmates and my environment. People were not friendly to me, and Beijing was a harsh environment. I like Beijing, but I did not like my experience in the Central Academy because from 1996 to 2000 the Academy changed location.

From the center in Wang Fujin, they moved faraway to the Northeast side of Beijing. It was a very tough environment. Eight people shared the same room, and forty people shared three bathrooms. Apart from that the art education was traditional. We studied European technique, traditional Chinese and mural painting. Also, the name was prestigious, and we traveled around the country because we had to experience life as a group. We were nine in my class. So, we went to the East by the beach, and we painted local people. We also went to the North to Dung Huang to live in the mountains and study the cave murals. I was trained to be professional, and after I did not want to stay in Beijing. So, I went to Byam Shaw School of Art in London for an MA in Fine Arts. It was a very small school, but I was very comfortable. I mean, It was a cultural shock. I was a one of the few Chinese artists to study abroad because it is hard to afford school fees. Fortunately, I got a scholarship, so I was able to survive. I did not need to work the first year, but the MA was hard and my English was really bad. So, I had to start all over again and nobody taught me anything because nobody teaches you how to learn to live in London. Nobody teaches you that because in my surroundings there were only Westerners. So, I had to find my own way.

• Do you think that isolated experience in Beijing and London shaped your art practice?

‣ Yes, very much. I felt very isolated. In a way that shaped my character and I became stronger. I do not care if other people put me down. I just stop them. I am quite stubborn. I know that it might be difficult, but I still want to try it. So, I wrote my dissertation, and I could barely survive. Fortunately, I got a degree, but I was so hard. I could not do anything else apart from studying. Then, the second year, they gave me for a scholarship at the same school, and I did research in whatever I wanted. This gave me time to understand the city a little bit more. So, that year I did the kind of work I am satisfied with, like the Black Hair series which was the foundation to apply for Royal College.

• What prompted to you to do the kind of work for the Hair Series. Why hair?

‣ First of all, I did the Chinese erotic painting series.

• Let’s talk about the erotic paintings.

‣ When I went to the Louvre in Paris, my first year in Europe, a boy showed me a catalog of Chinese erotic paintings called Rain and Clouds. I was dumbfounded by those images, because as a Chinese living in China we could never see pictures like those. People can search for erotic paintings, but it is very rare to see beautifully made images of people having intercourse. I have never seen anything like that before. I don’t know if you know my process. I took slides out of the erotic paintings catalog. Then, I projected the slides on the model’s body. So, she was asked to pose in the bathtub. I photographed the erotic painting with the body, with bubbles, and water. So, it was quite mysterious.

• Why erotic images, because you found them?

‣ Yes, because I found them. The meaning is water and moon, as they both represent the female. Also, poets wrote many Asian fairy tales about moon, and water. So, in the image the body is firm like a mountain, because it is a very close up. I cropped the slide as round image. So, it is like the moon projected on a mountain. Basically, it is about the romantic, and water is a thing that relates to those stories. I always imagine what happened in the past about females, about sex, about love, and I think it is very mysterious. So, I moved on to the Black Hair. One day, I was running the slide projector and I clicked. Suddenly there was no slide, so it was very bright. That was a powerful light source. So, I took a photograph of that, and that was the beginning of the Black Hair series. In Black Hair 1 you can see the neck and the hair. The light is very strong. So, that leaves the female body very fragile and vulnerable. This was the beginning of my second project, I began to photograph the female body, hair, and water.

• I would like to have more feedback on the erotic work.

‣ Well, in my early work most of the colors are dark. The color used is black because it is mysterious, and I want to translate old masterpieces into a contemporary version. I used a flash light for very little light. So, the bubbles, the water, and the body made a scene that is mysterious. A feeling that I wanted to express is going back to the mother’s womb. So, you only see parts of a wet body floating on the water, and then you see these erotic paintings. Vaguely you see a male and a female having intercourse. So, it is also about a very vivid spirit, it is about human beings. It is about life, regeneration, and birth.

• You mentioned mysteriousness. Why mysteriousness?

‣ I want to try to understand my past because the images are from China. So, I want to understand how Asians understood women, because birth it is also a woman’s function. It is also about sex, and intercourse. So, I use water as a link because for thousands of years water has always been the same thing. I literally put the painting inside the water to find out those mysterious stories. So, the water is a link, and I can go to back in time when people made those paintings. It is composed of this curiosity about the meaning of femaleness, love, and sex. By putting those images in water, with the body, I try to figure out what is the link between now and then. It is time and it is in the dark.

•What is the meaning of hair for you?

‣ Hair is female beauty, and it can also give an ominous feeling -- especially black hair. I do black hair because Asian women have black hair. It is not like blonde hair : that means excellent beauty. Black can be very mysterious. It is good and bad at the same time. I link black hair to sex. Sex is mysterious, beautiful and exciting, but it can be ominous too. Wet hair on the body is suggesting of something beautiful, but many people might think of it as ugly and disgusting. Also, wet hair on the naked skin relates to sex. In the second stage of the work I use wigs, so the hair is detached from the body.

• What about Hair City for example, is that a wig?

‣ Hair City was done around 9.11. I did not do it on purpose, but when I saw my photograph it is actually two towers with a detached wig flying above the city sky. So, it gives an ominous feeling about uncertainty of life. In my first two series it was always about death and sex. In the erotic paintings is about death too. For example, the womb feeling : it is also about birth, death, and intercourse. It is like a “little death” -- that is French though.

• What is the significance on the characters being an Asian girl and a Western male?

‣ That is a rebellion of Asian girls because they are described as soft and obedient, while the white male is seen as member of the most powerful group in the world. So, this girl is getting her ride and she is hitting the man. She is liberating herself from authority. It is about how weak people get their own position. Of course, I do it in a very playful way, so it is not a very critical statement, although I do make reference to the Cultural Revolution. Rebellion is the rule. So, all my work is under that concept. I always use young female, Chinese or Japanese girls as the weak group that challenges authority.

• You grew up during post-revolutionary China and the opening to the West, can you talk how the politics and the social changes has influenced your work?

‣ As a young girl growing up in this society there was no voice for young people. That is why you see in my work that I always want to rebel. After so many wars and the cultural revolution, the society was oppressed, and it is still oppressed. In my work I want to make my own rule from the young generation. I have that from the Cultural Revolution, to make my own revolution and use my art as a tool.

• How was it for you being a Chinese woman artist in China?

‣ I was depressed, and oppressed as well. That is why I went abroad because Beijing, I don’t know who is going to read your article, was a bad place for young female artists four years ago. There were almost no young female artists, most of the artists were middle age males. The few female artists were above thirty five. I was in my early twenties, so no young voices could be heard. There were no opportunities at all, but now suddenly there are more opportunities in the past four years. Now, China starts to develop quickly.

• What do you think now that you have left that moment, time and place, and you are a diaspora Chinese woman artist, who lived in London, and lives in New York city?

‣ No identity, I think it is a contemporary trend. In the future nobody will settle in one country. You will always travel and be international with no identity. In the beginning, I thought maybe I should say I am Chinese, then I said, maybe I belong to England, maybe here. I don’t really care anymore. I think wherever you are you need to keep your mind fresh to make art and be able to rebel to whatever you feel like. I can rebel here, it does not have to be China.

• So, rebelling against the art establishment, the political, and economical establishment?

‣ Actually, the political and economical because while living in the West I am making work like the China girls series. I set little girls against Western old men. That is a challenge to Western authority both economical and politically, because China is booming economically. It is growing fast, so the China girls represent China. They are fresh, young and have so much energy. It is like the impression China gives to Westerners. They say “Chinese are everywhere” or “China is so fast”. The girls are cute, a little naive, but their gaze is very powerful, penetrating if you look at them carefully. Some critics and curators in England wrote about my Chinese girls work, and they said that they their gaze is monstrous and they are like little ghosts. So, they awaken fear in Westerners. I placed together Chinese girls with Western men. So, he is naked and lying down. If you put these images together you can understand why this girl is powerful and this man is passive. He is like a dead god like the West and capitalism. A curator from the Tate Modern said “I don’t feel comfortable when I see those works”.

A version of this interview was published in Futuro Magazine in 2006.