Zodiac figures,

2002

Zhang’s experience first as a Muslim outsider in China and later, after he moved to the United States in 1982, as a Chinese outsider in America, has had a formative influence on his art. His sculptures and paintings address themes including dislocation and cross-fertilization as well as repression and political grandstanding. Zhang’s fascination with Chairman Mao, under whose authority the artist and his family lived and suffered in the 1960s and 1970s, is reflected in this funny riff on the traditional Chinese zodiac. Here all twelve of the signs have been refigured as mutants with the heads of animals and the bodies of Chairman Mao. With this gesture, Zhang uses humor and appropriation to deflate the power of this otherwise formidable icon. Zodiac Figures was commissioned by the Princeton University Art Museum on the occasion of the exhibition Shuffling the Deck (2003). It reimagines a Chinese zodiac figure from the Northern Wei dynasty (386–535) that is also in the Museum’s collection.