Zhou Tiehai

Often referred to as the "Chinese Warhol," Zhou Tiehai's Placebo series demonstrates the artist's debt to American Pop Art and the duality between East and West.[1] The Shanghai-based artist depicts Joe Camel, the iconic symbol of Camel cigarettes (an American important into China), in the context of classic Western paintings. Deliberately resisting subjects of political commentary, the artist chooses instead to explore the cultural influences of Western society on its own. Historically, the camel was depicted as a caricature for Western foreigners, familiar to Shanghai's residents through the city's ancient trade relationship with the West; the artist cleverly references this fricative relationship also.

Zhou Tiehai is less concerned with the historical context of the paintings, than he is with the iconography used to articulate the way his culture perceived the West. For this reason, he has focused mostly on classical subjects such as aristocrats and saints. In this image, Zhou Tiehai has used French royal portrait painter Louise Elizabeth Vigee-LeBrun's Prince Heinrich Lubomirski as the Genius of Fame, painted in 1789. Compared to this, Deity with Laurel Crown remains unchanged with the inevitable and obvious exception of the substitution of Prince Heinrich's visage for Joe Camel's head.

[1] Eleonora Battiston, Zhou Tiehai, catalogue for an exhibition at Marella Arte Contemporanea, Mila, Sept. 18-Oct 31, 2003, p.12.