In 1935, at the height of the Great Depression, a group of retired New York City businessmen decided to create an international exposition to lift the city and the country out of despair. O Zhang’s Cutting the Blaze to New Frontiers marks the 70th anniversary of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, harking back to its original aspirations against the backdrop of today’s financial crisis. While the 1939 Fair was the largest of all time, Zhang has assembled a miniature Fair of national pavilions, hand-crafted by a group of Queens teenagers of immigrant parents. These teenagers had never visited their parents’ countries of origin, but collected information and materials about their family history to represent an imagined “motherland.” Zhang’s mini-Fair suggests that the inimitable vigor and increasingly complex cultural demographics of Queens are, in fact, the future of the nation. A mural-sized group portrait of the teen participants will serve as a U.S. pavilion. One of the most popular attractions of the 1939 Fair, the Washington House Time Capsule, will also be re-enacted with Zhang’s own 21st Century version in which visitors are encouraged to write on a wooden tablet about things they do not wish the future generations to know. Collected “Secrets” will be cremated at the end of the exhibition as a public event. The exhibition’s title is the artist’s play on the 1939 World’s Fair DuPont Pavilion motto - Blazing the Trail to New Frontiers Through Chemistry.

O Zhang is a graduate of Central Academy of Art in Beijing and the Royal College of Art in London. She moved to New York in 2004, and since then has been living and working between New York and Beijing. The insightfully selected subjects in her recent photographic series -Chinese girls as the most unwanted population in contemporary China, Western families adopting young Chinese girls, and the rapid globalization of Beijing-speak eloquently about the societal and cultural transitions in China today.