Name: The Monkey King Goes to Work - Acrylic on Canvas 15.7'' × 19.7''
Brand: ZHANGYONGJIU
Price: 1050.0 USD
Availability: InStock

The Monkey King Goes to Work - Acrylic on Canvas 15.7'' × 19.7''

$1,050.00 USD

The Monkey King Goes to Work - Acrylic on Canvas 15.7'' × 19.7''

$1,050.00 USD

Shipping calculated at checkout.

Title：The Monkey King Goes to Work

Artist: Zhang Yongjiu
Medium: Acrylic on Canvas

Artwork size: 40 × 50 cm (approx. 15.7 × 19.7 in)

Framed size: 60 × 70 cm (approx. 23.6 × 27.6 in)

Year: 2026
Frame: Light champagne metal frame with a wide ivory mat and a thin inner metallic liner

Artwork ID: MBA-2026-012

Authenticity: Original · One of a Kind · Signed Certificate of Authenticity

Overview

The Monkey King Goes to Work unfolds against a luminous orange field, where the figure of the Monkey King (Sun Wukong), floating masks, and memory-like fragments form a narrative that feels both playful and slightly uncanny.

As one of the most iconic figures in Chinese culture, the Monkey King traditionally represents freedom, rebellion, and spiritual independence. Here, however, he appears to be “getting ready for work”—putting on a face before stepping into the day. This quiet reversal brings a mythological hero into a contemporary context, turning the painting into a metaphor for modern life: the roles we assume, the identities we perform, and the expressions we prepare before facing the world.

What appears childlike at first glance is not naïveté. The work reflects a deliberate artistic liberation. Returning to painting in his seventies, the artist chose to step beyond academic conventions and fixed formulas, embracing a freer and more intuitive visual language. The result is a painting shaped by memory, metaphor, and creative emancipation—one that resists a single “correct” reading and instead reveals new layers the longer one lives with it.

Zhang Yongjiu

Zhang Yongjiu (b. 1954) is a contemporary painter and writer whose artistic practice moves from realism toward dreams, memory, and inner vision.
With decades of experience as a published author and a member of the China Writers Association, his paintings are shaped by a deep literary sensibility, emphasizing metaphor, psychological space, and intellectual reflection.

Zhang began painting later in life, bringing to the medium a rare clarity of purpose and independence from academic convention.
Rather than depicting the external world, his recent works—primarily in acrylic and oil—explore inner experience, where fragments of dreams, emotion, and memory surface with quiet intensity.

For Zhang Yongjiu, painting is not a display of technique, but a form of inner writing—an honest and reflective process that gives visual form to what is felt, remembered, and imagined.