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Shellie Zhang's work is a mixture of "grown up" Japanese Anime, modernized Chinese propaganda posters, graphic novel illustrations and Disney cartoons, all with an undertone of sex. It is curious that she chooses these styles for her work, but not completely unexplanatory. Zhang's artistic education and career evolved in Canada. Her cirriculum vitae omits any information on her native China, but it is clear that she was born in China, and most likely lived most of her childhood and adolescence there, from her Instagram photographs. And this brief biography describes her background as:
Shellie Zhang is a Toronto-based artist who was born in Beijing and raised in various parts of China, the United States, and Canada.Still, for all this cosmopolitanism, her primary focus is on China.
In 2013, at the University of Toronto, she sealed that perspective with her exhibition: Made in China. Here is how the program describes her work:
This installation examines mass produced Chinese objects and trinkets as an entry point into the evolving nature of how Chinese culture is represented and misrepresented in western countries -particularly as these objects are produced primarily for western consumption- while also navigating the influence and interconnected nature of the artist’s simultaneous Chinese and Canadian identities.Don't be fooled by the "simultaneous Chinese and Canadian identities." These multicultural "Canadian" artists do try to approach their art through some kind of Canadian lense, but they do this in order to understand, and to be able to better incorporate, their own ethnic backgrounds.
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For example, in Zhang's Made in China (from program notes at the The University of Toronto's Munk Center for Global Affairs on July 11 - August 16,2013):
This installation examines mass produced Chinese objects and trinkets as an entry point into the evolving nature of how Chinese culture is represented and misrepresented in western countries - particularly as these objects are produced primarily for western consumption - while also navigating the influence and interconnected nature of the artist's simultaneous Chinese and Canadian identities.The school describes its program Student Perspectives: Global Aesthetics, thus:
The Munk School of Global Affairs presents Student Perspectives: Global Aesthetics: a Political art exhibition curated by Masters of Museum Studies students. As cultural boundaries stretch, art can act as a powerful mediator in understanding concepts like globalization, war and nationalism. This exhibition examines the enmeshment of art with the local and global through the work of visual studies students at the University of Toronto.The exhibition is curated by the students of the Masters Program in Museum Studies, University of Toronto:
Danielle Megallin
Caitlin Sutherland
Zhang alos takes this oppourtunity to pose nude (she has been edging towards disrobing in her various "themes"), abut now she does so with a purpose. She posed sitting with her back to the viewer, and has a "bar code" on tatooed on her back. I think this is a real tatoo, and she never says what that thatoo is, but she has the piece in a collection called "Made in China."
Here is her less blatant piece, which she calls "Instant Gratification" which is series of infants' dummies, which are clearly a reference to nipples.
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