Zhang Huan B. 1965

As the first of Zhang Huan's sculptures, "Rubens" marks the moment, in 2001, when the artist's work left the realms of the performative and the photographic, progressing into the heft and monumentality of bronze. While this work (like the sculptures "Peace I," "Peace II," and Pencil Piece " which would follow) centers on the same theme of the artist's strained body that underlay his earliest performances, that body is here transformed into a site not simply of endurance but rather permanence.

"Rubens" comes from a performance that Zhang Huan was invited to give at the Abbey of Heverlee by art-world eminence grise Jan Hoet, director of Documenta X and now director of the SMAK in Ghent. Starting from Peter Paul Rubens's 1616 painting "The Rape of the aughters of Leucippus," Zhang Huan realized a work in which he laid out, prone to the touches of the curators and collectors who participated in the performance; it is these hands on which those covering the sculpted body are modeled. The Cotthem Gallery of Brussels commissioned this sculpture to document the performance shortly thereafter.

Cast in bronze, gilt, and set on a base of Belgian blue stone, the artist's body is ironically as vulnerable as it was in the East Village community of Beijing performance artists in the mid-1990s where Zhang Huan first found his creative voice. Here, however, the flies that covered his honeyed flesh "Twelve Square Meters" and the needles that drew his blood in "65 Kilograms" are replaced by the hands of the European art-world elite who commissioned and first witnessed this piece.

Recounting his creation of the piece, Zhang Huan has remarked that:

"The exhibition was in the stables behind a Catholic church.  The idea came from Rubens' famous painting The Rape of Olympia.  It was an extremely literary and theatrical performance, and I consulted sources on life in Rubens' time as well as the iconography of the painting.  The performance has three parts.  In the first part, I made exact sculptures of the hands of the monsignor of the church, the curator of the exhibition, and a Belgian collector.  The second part re-enacts the rape.  The third part demonstrates the emotional conflicts between Rubens and his lovers and  models.  I acted as Rubens.  The performance lasted for eighty minutes. All actors were in period dresses, and I also hired twelve professional knights and horses.  In total more than fifty people participated in the performance, playing the wife of Rubens, his assistants, the king's daughters, the deity’s sons and so on.  At the end of the performance, Rubens was stripped bare by his models and lovers, who used wheat to bury him and made a pyramid.  The piece emphasized invasion and violence, and people's desire for possession and power. I tried to explore the meaning of the hand.  For an artist, museums and collectors are propellers, and yet at the same time they are killers."
In Rubens, Zhang Huan has traded one context and its dangers for another, to shocking effect.