Shanghai-born, now New York-based conceptual artist Jian-Jun Zhang began working with historic artifacts in the mid-1990s. The work of past artists has always worked to inspire later generations, but as the twentieth-century drew to a close, contemporary artists no longer sought to extend the ideas of masters who had gone before them. Instead, they turned to existing, familiar forms of art and culture in their work to question the value of art in their own times. Jian-Jun Zhang does this with painting, where Chinese ink and oil paint are overlaid on canvas and on rice paper; together and separate at the same time, producing compositions that may be Eastern in aura but are far from being brush painting in the conventional sense of Chinese painting.
Jian-Jun Zhang also uses familiar forms of pottery from China’s dynastic past to reflect upon aesthetic values that pertain to craft through what we term “traditions”. Conflating debates about appropriation, ready-mades, pastiche and production, we might ask how will his pots be valued by future generations should they be dug up in a thousand years’ time? The real question is what they represent of art today.
