1996

New World Map (Selected Scriptures, Page 3535)

Chinese, born 1965

In recent years many younger Chinese artists have been injecting popular images from everyday life into their work to reflect their awareness of contemporary culture abroad. This is true of Hong Hao's ongoing series Selected Scriptures, in which he reproduces double-spread pages of world maps from antique atlases. Here, in a cunningly updated Renaissance map labeled "New World Map-New View," the artist has introduced a series of icons that represent the West's modern free-world materialistic culture, such as the cell phone, computer, skyscraper, and convertible.