Zhang Huan

signed in pinyin, dated 2007 and numbered 6 on the reverse

This work is in very good condition overall.
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Zhang Huan is a master of the surreal gesture, so that his brief performances carry with them the results of an esthetic easily capable of shocking and amazing his viewers.  Fifteen years ago, in 1994, Zhang showed just how capable he is of enduring circumstances most of us would find impossible; in 12 Square Meters, he sat motionless for an hour in a filthy public lavatory while coated with fish oil and honey. Flies were drawn to Zhang Huan's naked body, and his performance was memorable because it entailed what can only be called a feat of endurance. Over the years Zhang Huan would become famous for his willingness to take on such extreme conditions; however, more recently he has returned to making objects, saying that he has run out of ideas for performance-based actions.

 

Some of the artist's most interesting recent work has been paintings produced with ash; in a quote from an artist's statement, he says: "I use ash to express and combine all the dreams, aspirations, all the spiritual longings, all the ideas that people have somehow infused into incense ash." Ash, resonant in both Asian and Western culture of cremation, has in Zhang Huan's hands become a medium of filial piety and awareness of spiritual longing and tradition. Zhang Huan has always been attracted to spectacle, and his giant sculptures of the Buddha's body parts—a hand or a leg, for example—suggest that he is most interested in restoring spirituality to the art he makes—and to his audience as well. Working with as many as one hundred assistants, Zhang Huan shows us what spectacle is capable of meaning in a culture in which ritual devotion remains powerful. His grand sense of size indicates that he wants his statement to overwhelm the sensibility of his audience. By using incense ash, the artist literally works with pious materials, so that the very making of the image is infused with a sense of devotional power. In a sense, he is returning to the actions and beliefs of more traditional artists, whose intensity of emotion and belief he wants to re-create in his own art.

 

In a recent show in New York City, Zhang Huan offered viewers a huge American flag. Movingly, the artist has produced an icon of his stay in America. With National Flag No. 6 (2007) (Lot 736), he has also produced a very large version, in ash, of the Chinese flag, which seems to flap in the wind. What meaning does the use of ash have in regard to this public iconography? The flags are enduring symbols of these two imperial nations, both of which have sought a place of dominance in the geopolitics of contemporary public life. As icons of patriotism, they mean more than the simple presentation of an image. The Chinese flag, in its grand dimensions, tells the viewer a lot about the Chinese drive toward power, which is increasingly valid as time continues. It may also say something about Zhang Huan's own ambitions, which are considerable themselves. Yet we remember that the image has been made with incense ash, a material of religious meaning that would suggest Zhang Huan is aware of the futility of such drives, being cognizant of the spiritual need for something else besides pride. With both intelligence and ambition, he conflates states of being—patriotism and piety—into a symbol of an entire nation. This image thus indeed takes on a greater meaning than what it seems to be.

 

In Titled Series: Recruit (2007) (Lot 734), we see a diptych of two soldiers in uniform, with one soldier in shadow and the other's face highlighted. Again, this scene may reference China's ambition to become a world power; and again, the use of incense ash tends to undermine the imperial reach of the image. The surface of these ash paintings is strikingly rough, a quality that Zhang Huan uses to fine effect, shifting light and shadows brilliantly. Whatever the symbolic meaning of the recruit in a specifically Chinese sense, we also know the image's universal suggestion of war, a category of aggression that acts as a perfect metaphor for our current affairs. Zhang Huan creates images whose overall content is quite a bit larger than the sum of their parts; they correspond to his own purpose—the creation of an art that reflects both the particularities of China and the universals of the human condition. His ambition thus comes across as being slightly larger than life.

 

Untitled (2006) (Lot 735), a mixed-media piece, depicts a donkey, whose body is partially outlined by feathers. Given the very large dimensions (360 by 250 cm), this image concurs with Zhang Huan's larger-than-life view of things. It shows the donkey standing in the midst of horizontal lines that might well be hay or even water; these lines are printed on the lower two thirds of the paper, with the top third devoted to bands of mostly black, on top of which one finds the white silhouettes of more feathers. The donkey recalls Chinese agricultural labor, while the feathers attached to the animal's front, eye, back, belly, and tail lend it a bit of magical presence. The image's stark, black-and-white simplicity makes it that much more affecting; the viewer senses that Zhang Huan is making open reference to peasant tradition, both in the content of the image itself and in the directness of the way it is communicated.

 

The five silkscreen prints that comprise Dragonfly (2006) (Lot 733)refers to a well-known image taken from Zhang Huan's performance 12 Square Meters; in that particular action, after his hour of endurance, the artist walked from the public latrine into a nearby pond (his progress was documented by the photographer Rong Rong). In the first four prints, we follow the artist into the water, seeing his back only; with each image, his body moves deeper into the pond, while a red dragonfly, much larger than Zhang Huan himself, hovers closely over him. By the time we encounter the fourth image, there is only a circular ripple of water to indicate his presence, and here the dragonfly, tail up, is quite some way above the pattern of water. In the last image, the dragonfly is gone, but a small hillock, much like an island, rises up from the same point where Zhang Huan totally submerged himself. The series references both the artist's earlier work and, with the dragonfly, traditional Chinese painting. It even suggests a myth, in which the artist's sacrifice turns into an island, surrounded by mist. In this work and in the others described here, Zhang Huan consistently moves toward a personal mythology, made larger and grander by both his ambition and his identification with China itself, growing by leaps and bounds. His work now has not only the status, but also the aura, of the classic.