Zhou Tiehai (; born 1966) is a contemporary Chinese artist. Trained as a painter in his native Shanghai, Zhou co-founded Shanghai's first international art fair, SH Contemporary, in 2007, assumed the directorship of the Minsheng Art Museum in 2010, and founded

West Bund Art & Design West Bund Art & Design () or the "West Bund Art & Design Fair" is an annual international contemporary art fair held Shanghai, China during November. Location West Bund Art & Design is located on the western side of the Huangpu River in Shangh ...

in 2014.

Artistic career

Zhou's art work often attempts to satirize much of modern

Chinese art Chinese art is visual art that originated in or is practiced in China, Greater China or by Chinese artists. Art created by Chinese residing outside of China can also be considered a part of Chinese art when it is based in or draws on Chinese ...

. He does not paint his own works, though he earned a M.F.A. from the

School of Fine Arts The School of Fine Arts or College of Fine Arts is the official name or part of the name of several schools of fine arts, often as an academic part of a larger university. These include: The Americas North America *Alabama School of Fine ...

Shanghai University Shanghai University, commonly referred to as SHU, or colloquially Shangda (), is a public research university located in Shanghai. The 555-acre main Baoshan campus is situated in the north of Shanghai, and there are two other campuses in Jiadi ...

in 1989. He was quick to perceive the subtle colonialism that undergirded the Chinese art world of the early 1990s. Zhou takes on the role of both artist and patron, as many of his airbrush paintings are rendered by assistants under his supervision. A typical process for Zhou Tiehai is to conceptualize a work, realize it on the

computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as C ...

, then rely upon the help of assistants to physically create it. He is mostly known for appropriating the Camel advertising character that he calls

Joe Camel Joe Camel (also called Old Joe) was an advertising mascot used by the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (RJR) for their cigarette brand Camel. The character was created in 1974 for a French advertising campaign, and was redesigned for the American ...

(playing on his family name "Zhou") and making large paintings that reference famous western motifs from art history. Even though Zhou's work is exhibited widely in China and abroad, he does not produce any new work.

Museum Director

In 2009, Zhou was appointed Director of the

Minsheng Art Museum Minsheng is a Chinese word for "the people's wealth-fare". The word appeared in ancient book such as '' Zuo zhuan'', but most notably as one of the Three Principles of the People. It may also refer to: Companies * China Minsheng Bank, a Chinese comm ...

Shanghai Shanghai (; , , Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ) is one of the four direct-administered municipalities of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The city is located on the southern estuary of the Yangtze River, with the Huangpu River flow ...

West Bund Art & Design

In 2014, Zhou founded

and serve as Artistic Director. For Zhou, the continuously uncertain and evolving status of art in Shanghai—conveyed by the provisional material nature of this collage—is rich with possibility.Tinari, Philip. ''Theater of the World: Art and China after 1989''. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2017. "Zhou Tiehai, There Came a Mr. Solomon to China, 1994."

External links

Zhou Tiehai at 88MoCCA - The Museum of Chinese contemporary art on the web

* http://www.shanghart.com/artists/zhoutiehai/ex.htm
Official website

References

Living people 1966 births Artists from Shanghai {{China-painter-stub