Depending on your political persuasion, religious beliefs, nationality, sex and race, 2016 could be considered as a year of chaos for the world. No place on earth, however, do the cultural winds blow stronger and harder than in China. Despite the innate need and desire of the Chinese people to strive for more, it is this eclectic environment that was the genesis of The Cultural Storm project.
In China, the biggest ‘Cultural Storm’ in the nation's history was the cultural revolution. The end of the cold war and collapse of the Berlin Wall coupled with Deng Xiao Pings vision to open China to the world. As we entered the turn of the millennia, China has undergone enormous economic growth and will soon become the world’s largest economy by 2020 according to the WTO. This has also been followed by the cultural hurricane of Chinese contemporary art as well as the ‘Cultural Storm’ of the Chinese internet.
I use my art to help visualize the eye of the storm and these illustrations are a collection of the wild wins of crazy China. I purposely choose terms popularized in Chinese internet culture (Tu Hao, the Land of counterfeiters Made in China & Money) and arrange them to into a series of collages. This collection is now collaborating with a Chinese street fashion brand as well as being printed onto skateboards.
