Civilization, however, works against monumentality by inverting the very aspects with which it is commonly associated: size and magnification.

Made in 2004, Civilization refers to a context in which the viewer needs no self-affirmation. In fact, it is art that somehow needs to be affirmed. Among the most commercially successful Chineseartists in the new millennium, Zhou works in a time and place that frequently accord art no more than commodity status. In magnifying
a faded image to almost hyperbolic proportions, Zhou stresses the ephemeral and evasive nature of images generally.

About Zhou Tiehai
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Zhou Tiehai pushes this argument further in Civilization by decoupling monumentality from size. Measuring one metre fifty by six metres, the airbrushed triptych shows a plane in mid-flight, hovering
above a narrow frieze of umber brown that presumably represents land or perhaps a coastline. Zhou isolates the plane in the middle panel, in turn flanked by two nearly identical blond monochromes. The plane is
meant to represent a US Navy reconnaissance plane that was forced to land on Hainan Island after colliding with a Chinese jet fighter in 2001.
The subject of the captured plane and its central depiction in the triptych mimic images meant to promote or commemorate the state. By isolating the plane in the very centre of this enormous composition,
Zhou strongly recalls Cultural Revolution-era images of Mao. The size of Civilization also recalls prior attempts to monumentalise Mao by radically enlarging his image to the point where it competed with the surrounding
built environment. Size accorded the image permanence, or the hope of continued existence despite changes elsewhere. Moreover it turned the image into a physical centre around which crowds could gather, as in the
case of the 1967 billboard in front of the Hangzhou Steel Factory. Civilization, however, works against monumentality by inverting the very aspects with which it is commonly associated: size and magnification.
By way of clarification, it is worth recalling Gerhard Richter’s Jet Fighter, another large painting showing a US military plane, this time as it patrols German airspace. Like Civilization, Jet Fighter
resembles a close-up, but one that only clarifies the ambiguity of the scene. The enlargement of the image to one metre thirty by two metres magnifies the artist’s tactical deployment of the blur, which altogether
recalibrates the subject of the painting by obliging the viewer to comprehend the image as both a representation and as a material smear of paint that undermines the transitive link between the representation of the
bomber and the viewer. Initially the blurriness registers as an allusion to the reconnaissance photography used to take pictures of military aircraft.
Disproportionately magnified on the canvas, however, the blur affirms the viewer’s subjectivity as one who sees. Painted in 1963, only two years after the erection of the Berlin Wall, this affirmation urged
viewers to recognise their selves in a time seemingly bent on the suppression of such recognition. Made in 2004, Civilization refers to a context in which the viewer needs no self-affirmation. In fact, it is art that somehow
needs to be affirmed. Among the most commercially successful Chinese artists in the new millennium, Zhou works in a time and place that frequently accord art no more than commodity status. In magnifying
a faded image to almost hyperbolic proportions, Zhou stresses the ephemeral and evasive nature of images generally.

for the complete text "Joan Kee: Why Chinese Paintings Are So Large" check
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2012.734481