Over in Foreign Policy, Christina Larson has an interview with the New York-based Chinese-American artist Zhang Hongtu. Zhang, who grew up in China under Mao Zedong but moved to the U.S. in 1982, is a dissident painter, but one with a comic touch—see his famous picture of Mao on the Quaker Oats can. While many of his artist peers back in China celebrated—and profited from—the country’s consumer boom, Zhang has mused on the dark side of his native country’s economic growth. “If more than a billion people care only about money and materialism, it is big trouble,” Zhang told Larson.
Lately, though, Zhang has shifted his focus to what is perhaps China’s greatest challenge going forward: pollution:
In 2008, Zhang returned to more politically-minded art, his most controversial collection since the Mao portraits. The twelve paintings in his “Shan Shui” (mountain, water) series tackle another troubling legacy of recent Chinese history — not Beijing’s efforts to stamp out so-called “spiritual pollution,” but the environmental costs of actual pollution. “Today the countryside is dying, and this is a great threat to Chinese people,” he says.
As a boy, Zhang traveled widely across China, especially during the period of China’s civil war, when his family was forced to move frequently, from Xi’an to Shanghai, Suzhou to Nanjing. In the 1960s, he remembers swimming in the cool, clean waters of the Yangtze River. “Now it is too dangerous even to touch,” he says, recalling an unpleasant encounter from a recent trip. “This is the reality today, black rivers and no fish.”
China’s astounding economic growth has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty—and made consumer goods more affordable for almost everyone, for better and for worse. But that growth has come at an environmental price, as USA Today pointed out in a recent story:
This year, China will leapfrog Japan to become the second-biggest economy on Earth, behind only the USA, predicts Ting Lu, a China economist with Bank of America-Merrill Lynch. Next month, China starts broadcasts on CNN and other networks of an image-boosting commercial featuring stars such as basketballer Yao Ming and China’s first astronaut, Yang Liwei.Back at ground level, though, in what remains a developing country, China’s people and government are struggling to deal with a series of natural disasters that some environmentalists believe are the deadly, man-made consequences of favoring economic growth over environmental protection.
An environmental consciousness is growing slowly in China, as the media, nascent green groups and ordinary citizens push back against the flood of pollution. Zhang’s newest paintings, which grapple with the spiritual and ecological cost of success—could be part of that movement. Check them out on this slideshow.