Brilliant Ideas Episode #18: Zhang Huan

In the early 1990s, in the middle of Beijing city, a man caused a scene by taking off his clothes. After spreading the white clothes he took off on the ground, the man raised a jar filled with blood and broken pieces of toys over his head, suddenly dropped it to the ground, and then created an object in a whole new shape with the scattered pieces. The newly created toy, called “Angel”, was installed on a wall of a gallery by the man, which marked the end of his performance.
This is the performance named Weeping Angels(1993) delivered in Beijing by Zhang Huan, one of the China’s first-generation performance artists. The performance was about abortion and death however it could not avoid a barrage of criticism from the Chinese art scene at that time, where the concept of performances and installation arts did not exist. Ironically, those who condemned him the most were the teachers and students of the art school Zhang was studying in. He was even fined for committing a public “misdemeanor” because some media saw his performance as a political act, simply focusing on the act of him taking off his clothes without looking at the artistic meaning of the performance.

In the 2000s, Zhang Huan showed works that are clearly distinguished from the past: images of the Buddha started to come out on to his works. As he made his debut by a performance, and has been letting himself known by continuous performances, the sudden appearance of the Buddha images raised a lot of questions from the public. The previous performances of his seemed resistant to the society as well as aggressive; the statues of the Buddha he newly created, which have a quiet and meditative ambience mood, seemed as if they are works of someone else. Zhang Huan responds to these questions by emphasizing that recent works are no different from his performances. He says that mental quietness and meditative emotions exist also in his early performances, and it is just that, as he embraced Buddhism, he has selected Buddhism-related subjects for his works, and the strong spiritual power inside rose more clearly on to the surface. It is the same with Zhang finding Buddhism. He was not suddenly fascinated by the religion after returning from New York to Shanghai; he always believed that, somewhere inside him it existed as his fate. He only made it official through a religious rite.

Born in China in 1963, Zhang Huan is an artist distinguished by his performances and sculptures. Based in Beijing and New York, the artist is one of the artists that started performance art in China. At the time when performances were not allowed, he performed in the middle of a public place in Beijing, and then formed a group with congenial friends of his to keep presenting performances. Zhang Huan moved to New York in 1998 and encountered the western trend of contemporary arts, which led his performances to be more focused on themes as poverty, individual freedom and cultural differences. Currently, he is creating sensations by presenting sculpture works in a religious manner with a story about humans. Zhang Huan has held a number of exhibitions including exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Shanghai Art Museum, the Palazzo Vecchio, the Forte di Belvedere, Firenze, and the Pace Gallery London. He has also been a part of the Venice Biennale 1999 and the Gwangju Biennale 2006, continuingly establishing himself as an internationally influential artist.