In Chunbo Zhang’s Meals Treasure sequence, cheese oozes from a patterned porcelain crust, whereas grease swimming pools round a burger with a ceramic-like bun. Painted in acrylic or watercolor, the fragile compositions seize the gluttony and extra of the quintessential American eating regimen.
Zhang, who’s based mostly in Chicago, started the sequence in 2018 after shifting to the U.S. and was struggling to adapt to her new environment, notably relating to meals. “It is not only essential in our daily life but also an entry point for foreigners to understand an unfamiliar culture,” she tells Colossal.
The artist discovered American dairy merchandise tough to digest and fashionable desserts like donuts and Oreos far too candy. As she puzzled learn how to bridge the divide between her Chinese language background and adopted house, she started to color sensible renderings of epicurean delights like deep-dish pizza and bagels thick with schmear. Besides the place a viewer would possibly anticipate finding a glistening egg-wash glaze or crispy crust, Zhang painted motifs from vintage porcelain.
Meals Treasure depicts lots of the dishes on a bigger scale, nodding to each the immense parts of the American eating regimen and in addition the outsized influence meals have on shaping our cultural identities. Every work emphasizes myriad tensions: exhausting and tender, uncooked and cooked, inedible and nourishing, historical and modern, practical and ornamental, excessive and low aesthetics. Reflecting Zhang’s anxieties, the works ask, “Do the two cultures fight each other or can they merge?”
Questions like this are elementary to the sequence and inform how Zhang chooses reference imagery from Chinese language wares that correspond to the dish. For instance, the cheeseburger is sandwiched between a motif that represents lengthy life and happiness, one other dichotomy contemplating the diner fare is unlikely to search out itself amongst any dietician’s suggestions. These patterns additionally replicate motion and migration as blue-and-white porcelain and elaborate, vivid florals emerged from cultural exchanges relationship again to the thirteenth century.
In 2023, Zhang started to consider the methods meals travels and painted an iteration of a drippy cheeseburger on remnants of a big FedEx field. The cardboard canvas references to-go tradition and the way pre-prepared and restaurant meals are sometimes faraway from their authentic context and consumed.
A number of works from the Meals Treasure sequence are on view by way of April 27 in Sustenance & Land at Elmhurst Artwork Museum. Discover extra on Zhang’s web site.
