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In Chunbo Zhang’s Food Treasure series, cheese oozes from a patterned porcelain crust, while grease pools around a burger with a ceramic-like bun. Painted in acrylic or watercolor, the delicate compositions capture the gluttony and excess of the quintessential American diet.
Zhang, who’s based in Chicago, began the series in 2018 after moving to the U.S. and was struggling to adapt to her new surroundings, particularly regarding food. “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 found American dairy products difficult to digest and popular desserts like donuts and Oreos far too sweet. As she wondered how to bridge the divide between her Chinese background and adopted home, she began to paint realistic renderings of epicurean delights like deep-dish pizza and bagels thick with schmear. Except where a viewer might expect to find a glistening egg-wash glaze or crispy crust, Zhang painted motifs from antique porcelain.
Food Treasure depicts many of the dishes on a larger scale, nodding to both the immense portions of the American diet and also the outsized impact meals have on shaping our cultural identities. Each work emphasizes myriad tensions: hard and soft, raw and cooked, inedible and nourishing, ancient and contemporary, functional and decorative, high 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 fundamental to the series and inform how Zhang chooses reference imagery from Chinese wares that correspond to the dish. For example, the cheeseburger is sandwiched between a motif that represents long life and happiness, another dichotomy considering the diner fare is unlikely to find itself among any dietician’s recommendations. These patterns also reflect movement and migration as blue-and-white porcelain and elaborate, vivid florals emerged from cultural exchanges dating back to the 13th century.
In 2023, Zhang began to think about the ways food travels and painted an iteration of a drippy cheeseburger on remnants of a large FedEx box. The cardboard canvas references to-go culture and how pre-prepared and restaurant meals are often removed from their original context and consumed.
Several works from the Food Treasure series are on view through April 27 in Sustenance & Land at Elmhurst Art Museum. Find more on Zhang’s website.
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