January 24, 2025
Art
Food
Grace Ebert

All images courtesy of Chunbo Zhang
In ‘Food Treasure,’ Chunbo Zhang cooks up delicate paintings that question the divide between two cultures.

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. […]

More: Chunbo Zhang Sandwiches Rich American Fare Between Ancient Chinese Treasures