Zhou Tiehai
Born in Shanghai, 1966 and lives in Shanghai, China
Zhou Tiehai was born in 1966 in Shanghai, and attended the art school at the university there, where he also lives and works today.
Zhou Tiehai’s conceptual projects represent the artist’s vengeful attitude towards the self-absorbed art market. His work’s power to amaze and provoke is the result of a host of strategies that mix antagonism with sincerity. The key ingredients that drive Zhou Tiehai’s unsettling yet amusing practice include appropriating classical imagery, generating ironic projections, proclaiming laconic yet heartfelt discourse, and actively subverting painterly craft. He takes on the role of both artist and patron as many of his airbrush paintings are rendered by assistants under his supervision. He permits himself to ‘play’ with art’s historical baggage by making paintings that are simultaneously self-aware and self-abnegating, virtuosic and pop culture are both present within a single canvas. He manipulates acclaimed magazine covers for his own purposes and articulates the notion of ‘artistic agency’ within current conditions of the art world and global economy. He makes self-promotional images that subvert the establishment notion of how artists should look and behave. Tiehai is also the director of West Bund Art & Design fair.
