Plum Blossoms New York is pleased to present The Way to China is the Way to America, a two-person exhibition featuring new and recent works by Beijing-based painter Ji Dachun and New York-based multimedia artist Zhang Hongtu.

Both artists address the complex relations between Eastern and Western artistic traditions through subversive wit. Ji Dachun, working in graphite and acrylic wash on canvas, infuses his paintings with grotesque humor and accident. His subject matter is the happenstance of everyday life reimagined in absurd collisions of form and context, as in the deadpan Mao, Stalin, Lenin, En, Marx (Rolls Royce), 2004, which shows world-Communist figures seated uncomfortably together in a vintage stretch-limo. Other works, such as Turning into a Tree, 2004, are more playfully transformative, combining human anatomy with natural observation. The subdued, self-consuming preciousness of these works expresses Ji Dachun's irreverent, individualistic aesthetic unique amongst current Chinese art.

Zhang Hongtu is a leading figure from an older generation of avant-garde Chinese artists. A long-time resident of New York, he employs his active imagination to lampoon the branding of China and its cultural history in the international art market. Zhang includes for exhibition signature multiples that incorporate historically-specific material processes with recognizable icons from the age of globalization: a cast-bronze McDonald's value-meal, blue-and-white porcelain Cola bottles, and soy-sauce silhouettes of Beijing's Forbidden City. This artwork, as well as large-scale digital prints mounted on scrolls combining photos of crowded bicycle traffic and traditional ink painting, uses pointed humor to engage the cross-directional cultural internalization that has characterized both China and America in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Ji Dachun lives and works as an artist in Beijing. He has exhibited extensively at international art fairs as well as festivals including the first Guangzhou Triennial, 2002, and the Shanghai Biennale, 2000. Recent international solo shows include the Posco Art Museum, Korea; Aura Gallery, China; and Base Gallery, Tokyo. Recent group shows include Democracy Forever, at Plum Blossoms New York, 2004; Images among Images, at the Shenzhen Art Museum, Shenzhen, China, 2003; and Another Modernism, at the Haus der Kulturen, Berlin, 1997. This is his first solo exhibition in the United States.