zhang huan 张洹

8/12/2019 Zhang Huan

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Zhang Huan

Bio

Zhang Huan was born in Anyang City, Henan Province in 1965, he graduated from HenanUniversity in Kaifeng in 1988 with a BA degree and got his MA in traditional painting at theChina Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1993. In the beginning of his career he wasprimarily a performance artist, but later became interested in photography, sculpture and othermedia. From 1998 to 2005 he lived in New York where he gained international recognition. In2005, he returned to Shanghai, and established Zhang Huan Studio, where he continues toexpand his artistic works, creating new forms and expanding into new areas. The ash paintingtechnique he created has added another method of painting to art history, other techniques,such as sculpting in cowhide, door carvings and feather woodcuts, to name a few, have all been

pioneered by Zhang Huan.

He and a group of like-minded friends founded an alternative artists' collective principallydedicated to time-based arts in the early 1990s. The East Village group, as they came to beknown, lived and worked on the outskirts of Beijing. Together they pioneered a performancepractice involving heavily symbolic acts of endurance and collective action.

Zhang’s performances , sculptures and photographs always involve his body in one way oranother, usually naked, occasionally involving masochistic actions. Buddhism, with its templemusic, sculptures and philosophy are a prevalent theme in Zhang Huan’s work.

Zhang Huan is represented by The Pace Gallery in New York.

Influences

Zhang Huan cites Tibetan Buddhism as a key influence of his works.

Works

Zhang Huan made a first solo piece entitled Angel in 1993 . In this performance, presented in

conjunction with the opening of a painting exhibition at the National Art Gallery in Beijing, hespread a white sheet on the ground in front of the exhibition venue, stripped almost naked, andemptied over his body a jar containing bloody red liquid and the parts of a dismembered doll.He then reassembled the baby and carried it into the gallery, where it was displayed as his'painting'. This work, a startling and visceral commentary on the Chinese government mandateof abortions for women conceiving more than the legal limit of one child, led to a quick closure



of the exhibition and serious censure of the artis t. Angel is characteristic of the performancesfor which Zhang Huan has subsequently become known.

Using his own naked body as a site of existential examination, Zhang's early performancesstaged the conflict between raw humanistic expression and stark social commentary. One of

the most intense examples of these earlier pieces is 12 Square Meters (1994) , in which theartist sat naked in a public toilet, covered in fish oil and honey, while flies slowly covered him.

In a group performance called 'To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond'(1997) , he asked 40migrant laborers to stand in a pond, their physical presence, presumably, altering its volume.This work expresses one kind of understanding and explanation of water. That the water in thepond was raised one meter higher is an action of no avail.

For another titled 'To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain,' he and nine other artists

climbed a mountain near Beijing, stripped and lay down on top of one another to create asecond, mini-peak.



Upon arrival to New York in 1998, Zhang quickly fell into a schedule of performances andcommissions from top cultural institutions, due partly to the reputation he had built in China, aswell as the changing appetite of a cultural establishment that was beginning to look outside itsown context for artistic talent. Zhang began to incorporate explicitly Chinese objects in hisperformances, such as in Pilgrimage – Wind and Water , his first major work in the city, stagedat P.S.1 in 1998 for the Asia Society exhibition “Inside Out: New Chinese Art.” Lying on a sheetof ice placed on a traditional wooden Chinese bed, Zhang attempted to instantiate the culturalshock he felt upon arriving in the city. With nine pedigree dogs of different breeds tethered tothe bed, the performance presented a stark contrast between the pampered animals andZhang’s discomfort. Over the n ext few years, the focus of Zhang’s works began to shift frominternal matters of the body to external matters of culture and state. By 2002, Zhang wasassimilated enough to strike a nerve among American audiences with My New York , a post-9/11 performance for the Whitney Biennial, in which he walked through the streets ofManhattan in a bodysuit made of raw meat —shaped to make him resemble a Hulk-likesuperhero —handing out white doves to onlookers who then released them in an immediateevocation of the US as a superpower. In a reference to the US bodybuilding culture, hestruggled under the weight of his raw musculature in a false display of strength that spoke tothe geopolitical and psychological anxieties of the time.

Less well known are his non-performance-based works. Three - the photographic series Foam(1998) and Family Tree (2000) , and the enormous bronze sculpture Peace (2001) - takentogether, describe a slightly different set of preoccupations and a more focused line ofinvestigation. In them, the artist presents his body again as a legible symbol, but nowtransformed in ways that recall his family history and speak to his experience of family as themost profound and formative of his life - a source of general inspiration and explicit subject ofmuch of his performance work.

Huan emphasizes family and cultural connections in the photographic series Foam (1998), tenpictures that feature the artist’s face covered in foam with members of his family bursting outof his mouth.



Similarly, his series of nine photographs titled Family Tree (2000) documents the artist’s face ascalligraphers painted personal and cultural stories on his skin until it was covered in ink. Thework was not staged as a performance event complete with an audience, but instead for thecamera, and it exists as a limited-edition series of prints of which Zhang is the sole author. Inkeeping with the performative but not collaborative spirit of his early works, Zhang has definedthese working meth ods as “performance -based concept photographs.”

After moving back to Shanghai in 2006, Huan has focused on sculpture, woodworking, andpainting. In a recent series titled Memory Doors , begun in 2006, he created screen prints ofphotographs depicting Chinese historical events on doors that he found in Shanxi Province. Hisinterest in Tibetan Buddhism is evident in a recent series of paintings and sculptures made fromash collected at Buddhist temples.

Exhibitions

Zhang Huan has held an astounding 32 solo exhibitions in the past ten years, he has also beenfeatured in many of the last two decades' most influential group exhibitions.

2013 Zhang Huan: Poppy Fields, Pace Gallery, New York, USA

Culture . Mind . Becoming, Collateral Event of Chinese Art at the 55th Venice Art Biennale 2013,

Palazzo Mora, Venice, Italy

Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Portrait of The Times: 30 Years of Chinese Contemporary Art, Power Station of Art, Shanghai

2012 Zhang Huan: Ash Paintings and Memory Doors, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada

2011 Zhang Huan: Q Confucius, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China

2010 Zhang Huan: Dawn of Time, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, China

Zhang Huan: Amituofo, Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Taipei, Taiwan

Zhang Huan: Hope Tunnel, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China

Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, The Guggenheim Museum, New

York

2009 Zhang Huan, Zhu Gangqiang, White Cube, London, UK

Zhang Huan: Memory Doors, Haunch of Venison, Zurich, Switzerland

And many many others.

His works are also in the public collection of Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, MetropolitanMuseum of Art in New York, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.



Critics

Zhang Huan has widely been considered the earliest and most influential full-time performance artist ofthe 1990's. It should be said that Zhang Huan's performance art pieces from early in his career to recent

times, from his work in mainland China to his work abroad, present a nearly consistent trend. Shiftingfrom internally focused performance pieces about the individual, distant and isolated [apart] fromothers, to collaborative group efforts; from individual performance activities to theatrical like exhibitionsinvolving participation by the audience; a shift from experiments where the protagonist took pleasure inthe uniqueness of his private experience to a more open and multi-faceted concept.

Gao Minglu

Auction Record

Around 400 of Zhang Huan’s works were sold in auctions worldwide starting 2001. An averageauction price for prin ts documenting Zhang’s performances was around 20 000 USD, with anexception of the sets of Family Tree prints which were sold for 100 000 USD. Zhang Huan’ssculptures were auctioned for around 50 000 USD, while his feather woodcuts for an average of150 000 USD and ash on canvas or linen paintings for around 200 000 USD.

In 2006, the artist hit a personal auction record at Sotheby's New York with his 2001 bronzesculpture Peace, an installation with a cast bronze bell hanging next to a horizontally suspendedbronze figure covered in gold leaf, which went for $408,000, soaring past its $200,000 highestimate.

zhang huan 张洹

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