Zhang Huan – A Portrait
Primarily known for his performance arts, Zhang Huan is a contemporary Chinese artist who has received equal reverence and criticism for his challenging pieces. Zhang has worked on different mediums of art, ranging from photography to sculpture but he is better known to both Chinese and international contemporaries for his controversial public performances which feature his naked body in confrontational situations.
Early Life and Influences
Zhang Huan was originally known as Dong Ming in the Henan Province where he was raised up. The name was inspired by Mao and titled to Zhang as a form of tribute to the late Chairman. After graduating from the Beijing-based China Central Academy of Fine Arts with his Masters in Arts, Zhang legally changed his name to its present title.
During his years at university, Zhang lived in challenging circumstances with a community of artists. He was widely inspired by the avant-garde and subsequently formed a collective of student artists in the impoverished area they were living in. With this group, Zhang intended to create performance art pieces depicting grotty scenarios. All of these pieces were tests of Zhang’s mental and physical endurance levels, while to viewers, it was a grotesque and hyperbolic representation of reality.
The First Work
The very first public performance art which Zhang curated was with his avant-garde. In 1993, the piece titled Angel appeared in front of the National Art Gallery in Beijing. Here, Zhang in front of the gallery’s staircase wearing just a piece of underwear while slathering himself with a jar of red liquid and dismembered parts of baby dolls.
This work abrasively tackled continuing political and religious issues in China. Once Zhang had finished slathering his body, he progressed on to reassembling the disembodied pieces on to a canvas that was stained with his red blood-like paint. Eventually, Zhang ties up the parts as a proud ensign. The blood which had spattered around the floor and the staircase was a vivid reminder to viewers about the massacre of Tiananmen Square, emulating the blood-stained streets which were an aftermath to the killings.
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Furthermore, the mutilated figures of the dolls represented the cruel ‘one-child’ policy which had been implemented in China from 1979 to 2016. The government-enforced abortions for women carrying a second child had left the traumatized mothers with a long-lasting psychological scar, which Zhang successfully attempted to model with his blood-stained ensign of mangled baby corpses.
While it was well-intended, Zhang’s first work incited a slew of criticism, penalizations, and ostracism from his group. The National Art Gallery had closed down all shows from the group while fining Zhang a great number as well as demanding him to criticize his own work. Zhang had to succumb to the Gallery’s exigencies in order to continue his group work at the gallery but this was refused to him. He was additionally confronted with terribly off-putting comments, ranging from him being ‘mad’ to a ‘pervert’. However, with the help and encouragement from his friend, the controversial and popular artist Ai Weiwei, Zhang soon recovered his center-stage as an artist.
Progression Through Art
Some of Zhang’s works are hard to consume, and this is an effect which he deliberately curates. One of his popular art, 12 Square Meters shows Zhang lying in a latrine while being covered with honey and fish oil. His body begins to attract hordes of flies and other insects but Zhang lies completely motionless and unbothered.
The work reminisces on Zhang’s childhood challenges. Due to China’s overpopulation issue, he had to grow up in crowded village areas and experienced harsh and squalid conditions. He talks about his experience in a public restroom of a similar state, ‘Once I stepped in, I found myself surrounded by thousands of flies that seemed to have been disturbed by my appearance. I felt as if my body was being devoured by the flies’.
The work To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain is a performance piece that Zhang created in collaboration with a group of other artists. Here, Zhang and his collaborators climbed up a mountain before stripping naked and towering over each other until they had combinedly added an extra meter to the mountain’s height. While explaining this artwork, Zhang references to an old cultural saying, ‘Beyond the mountain, there are more mountains.’ He considers the piece as a work about humility, ‘Climb this mountain and you will find an even bigger mountain in front of you. It’s about changing the natural state of things, about the idea of possibilities.’
The resonating of cultural and political ideas is prevalent through most of Zhang’s popular artworks. The 2001 Family Tree depicts Zhang in nine frames taken minutes apart, where Zhang begins to use calligraphic marks on his face until he is covered into a blackened mask. The calligraphy writes words, names, and stories which talk about his cultural heritage, but the final frame showing his darkened face highlights how his cultural identities have eventually obscured and masked his personal identity.
Zhang Huan – Later in Life
In 1998, Zhang relocated to New York. He began working on pieces that were inspired by his new setting. The performance titled My New York in 2002 sees Zhang in a suit made out of raw meat, representing over-sized muscles, as he moves about the city streets from the courtyard of the Whitney Museum.
He has staged countless performances around the world, moving from Spain, Boston, Hamburg, Berlin, and more. Presently, his work is exhibited in international museums such as Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, the Harvard University Art Museum, and a handful of others.
Furthermore, he has been featured in group exhibitions in biennales such as the 1999 Venice Biennale, 2000 Lyon Biennale, and the aforementioned 2002 Whitney Biennale. Zhang’s work continues to demonstrate an evocative reality that epitomizes and perhaps even exaggerates religious, cultural, and societal conceptions. Even if Zhang’s works are difficult to confront by normal viewers, no one can deny its visceral beauty, as Zhang states ‘I want it to be 70 percent beautiful, 15 percent surrealistically beautiful and the rest so beautiful that nobody can bear it.’
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