NARRATOR:
Press Conference III is a gouache on paper work created by Zhou Tiehai in 1996. The painting measures 297 centimetres high and 425 centimetres wide, which is about the height of one and a half doors stacked up, and the width of 5 doors placed side by side.
The painting depicts the artist standing on stage and giving a speech at a scene that resembles a United Nations press conference. On the lower half of the image is a line of subtitle.
The artist in the painting is a middle-aged Asian man who has a round face and black hair, wearing a black suit with a white shirt and a yellow tie. He stands in a formal manner behind a brown lectern, which is wider at the top and narrower at the bottom, resembling the shape of the capital letter ‘T’. The artist occupies over 80 percent of the height of the painting, and the lectern blocks the view of his body from the chest down. Facing the microphone on the lectern, the artist looks downwards with his mouth slightly open, as if he is giving a speech while gazing at an audience. Below him is a line of text that looks like a subtitle written in a black-filled frame with white font, which says, open double quotation mark, ‘The relations in the art world are the same as the relations between states in the post Cold War era’, close double quotation mark.
The entire painting is drawn on newspapers with jagged edges. The layouts of the newspapers with images and texts can be vaguely seen through the gouache paint. The background behind the man is painted in gold colour and eight flags are erected in a line, which appear to be the national flags of Denmark, the United States, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and other counties. The flags span the entire height of the painting and all of them are hanging down loosely.
