"It was mostly violent stuff," he said. "I would sometimes stick needles in people onstage."
When his career failed to take off, Zhou took a job at an advertising agency, producing commercials for state-owned television. But before long he regretted his decision to drop out of the art world.
In 1993, he met the American writer Andrew Solomon, who was working on an article about Chinese contemporary art for the New York Times Magazine. Solomon looked at his work but did not mention him in the article.
Zhou said he decided it would not be necessary for him to do the painting himself, since, to his thinking, his competitors were not terribly skilled painters anyway. His initial subject matter was what he saw as the absurdities of the art market.
One early work pictured Solomon, the writer who had passed him over, as Columbus discovering the new world of Chinese contemporary art.
Then came a series of fake magazine covers, including one of Newsweek proclaiming Zhou a rising star, and a fake newspaper article about a stock called Zhou Tiehai that went public and steadily gained value thanks to foreign buyers.
None of this, of course, was a solitary act of creation. Zhou hired a team of artists to execute his ideas. This left him free, he says, to focus on refining his concepts, and networking with collectors and gallery owners like Lorenz Helbling, founder of the ShanghART gallery.
"I came to Shanghai in 1994 and saw his works on paper," Helbling said. "I thought he was interesting. I remember a Belgian collector came to my home to look at some works. He found one of Zhou's pieces in a suitcase and he got excited about it." That was in 1996, and it was one of the first pieces Zhou sold, Helbling said.
Later, Zhou's work caught the eye of other big collectors like Sigg.
"The fact that he criticized the system brought him right into it," Sigg said in a telephone interview. "It was a clever strategy."
Since then, Zhou's evolving series of Joe Camel paintings have become his signature work. Zhou calls Joe Camel a likable character. But many in the art industry here say it is more clever than that. Joe Camel, they say, is the prototypical Westerner (Westerners are often referred to as "big noses" in China), but also Zhou's alter ego.
His Joe Camel is a globe-trotter who likes to play in the Western art world, wears dark sunglasses and does mischievous things, like inserting himself, Zelig-like, into paintings of historical scenes.
In creating his own brand, Zhou says he has beaten China's great artists at their own game, and no one really seems to mind.
On April 23 in Shanghai, there was an art show opening for Zhou Chunya, best known for his Green Dog series. Many of China's most successful artists were there, including Zhou. At the banquet afterward, upstairs at a fashionable restaurant, he strolled among tables, cigarette and wine glass in hand, hugging fellow artists and joining them in toasts. He was now firmly in the inner circle.
Asked how it felt, he grinned and said: "Ten years ago I wanted to show people how easy it is to make art. And I did that. Now I'm on the list."
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