Tui Bei Tu No. 36

This work by the avant-garde contemporary artist Zhang Huan depicts an unusual landscape composition of a mountain, bird, and sun based on an illustration from the book Tui Bei Tu. That enigmatic, seventh-century, prophecy book of images and poems takes its title from another illustration in the volume, a “picture of pushing the back.” Comprised of Tang dynasty cosmological interpretations of the classic text Yi Jing, the book was banned by the Chinese Communist Party in the mid-twentieth century as a superstitious relic of China’s “four olds”— old customs, culture, beliefs, and habits. In the 1990s, when Zhang moved from Henan in central China to Beijing for graduate study at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Tui Bei Tu was a popular text. It was available at bookstalls and secondhand stores and was seen as an interesting alternative to both official propaganda and the rhetoric of reform-era economic liberalization.
Each illustration in Tui Bei Tu uses visual puns to prophesize major dynastic shifts or other political downfalls. As with most astrological predictions, their meaning is anything but clear. In the case of Zhang’s interpretation here, a rising sun sits at the base of a mountain, and a close-beaked bird stands in profile at the top. Creating this work at a monumental scale, and incorporating feathers with the woodblock print, Zhang enlarged an image that would typically appear in a small, cheaply printed, hand held volume.

The monumentality of the scale of Zhang’s work, measuring more than 3.5 meters high, serves to further complicate the already-strange composition. The printed lines depicting the sun and its rays appear faded and at times hard to distinguish from the mottled, cloudy background, and bird’s body clearly reveals the imperfections and irregularities of the handmade paper. The mountain shape is eerily embellished with the addition of white feathers applied in a seemingly unmeditated, imprecise manner. The unrefined craftsmanship gives the entire work texture and a sense of motion.

Is the bird heralding the dawn of a new era, or are the textured mountain and bleached-out sunrise signs of a discombobulated world where expectations are turned on their heads? The inscrutable ambiguity of Tui Bei Tu fits perfectly with Zhang Huan’s work, which is subtly critical of Chinese society or policies while appearing abstract or apolitical.