Zhang Huan

titled and signed in Chinese, dated 2002 and numbered 3/8 on the reverse

Hamburg, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Zhang Huan, November 2002 - February 2003, p. 92
Bern and Hamburg, Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection, 2005, p.320
Denmark, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Made in China: Works from the Estella Collection, March - August 2007, fig.102
Jerusalem, The Israel Museum, Made in China: Contemporary Chinese Art at the Israel Museum, September 2007 - March 2008

Zhu Qi, ed., Chinese Avant-Garde Photography Since 1990, Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, 2004, p. 95
Zhang Huan, London, Phaidon, 2009, p. 77

framed, generally in good condition
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Currently one of the most recognized avant-garde artists in Mainland China, Zhang Huan has maintained a more or less impeccable reputation, even as he has switched allegiance to the making of paintings and sculptures after turning away from body art and conceptualism. Born in 1965 in He Nan Province, Zhang began studying oil painting in Beijing at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1991. At that point in time, he moved to a rundown part of Beijing on its eastern outskirts. Zhang and a few friends formed a small artist's collective there, calling it the East Village in emulation of the famed artistic neighborhood in New York. Once there, Zhang did a group of performances remarkable for their intensity, placing the artist on the edge of physical harm. One of his best-known pieces was 12 Square Meters (1994), for which he sat naked in a filthy public restroom, covered with honey and fish oil. The performance was typical of the artist in that it required remarkable physical endurance, placing him on the edge of what might be endured.

In October 1998, Zhang Huan performed his remarkable piece entitled Pilgrimage—Wind and Water in New York. For this event, he entered the gravel courtyard of the alternative New York City art space P.S. 1, kowtowing every few steps. Making his way to the stairs leading to the building's entrance, where a traditional bed had been covered with ice and surrounded with dogs tied to it, Zhang Huan lay down on top of the ice attempting to reach the mat that lay beneath. With Tibetan music as a background, Zhang Huan ultimately failed to make contact with the bed's surface—a failure, he notes, that changed him more than he changed his environment. Zhang Huan liked New York and stayed for seven years (he moved to Shanghai, where he now maintains a studio, in 2005). In New York, he concentrated on a series of performances, including the event he calls My New York (Lot 651), for which he covered himself with raw meat, sewn together by tailors, and released doves into the open air of the city's Upper East Side, in front of the Whitney Museum of American Art, which had sponsored the piece. Symbolic to the end, Zhang Huan pushes the boundaries of the body to comment on psychological and cultural differences that variously influence us in small ways.

But while Zhang Huan's researches are subtle, his findings move beyond details to a larger picture, one informed both by Buddhism and by Western art practice. The artist has always been a brilliant graphic artist, in the sense that he has known how to define visual images and events with primal energies—this is perhaps why he has done much of his work naked. Sometimes the allusions brought up by his art make perfect sense, and sometimes they are more obscure, placing the responsibility on his audience, who must make sense of an apparently absurd vision. In Window (2004), a compelling series of nine photographs, Zhang Huan pushes the envelope even more vividly. In the beginning we see the stuffed donkey alone, but in the next image we find Zhang Huan crouching beside it, naked to the waist. In the following images we watch the artist half-clothed or naked with the donkey, changing positions that are either simply strange or indicative of sodomy or bestiality. It has been pointed out that the sequence is in alignment with Joseph Beuys' famous interaction with a dead hare; however, unlike Beuys' animal, Zhang Huan's donkey is a cultural symbol: a beast of burden still used for agriculture. Zhang Huan remains an incisive observer of Chinese mores, even as he plays with the strangeness of the image.

Zhang Huan's suite of photographs is alluded to in the remarkable mixed-media sculpture Donkey (Lot 649), which in the photo of the event is seen as having sex with a slanted tower that is 320 mm high. The donkey has been placed on the side of the open-grid structure, leaving us with a memorable image of its erotic force, which is clearly absurd but rich with symbolic implications. As happens with much of Zhang Huan's art, the outrageousness of the image stems from an implicit yet public treatment of a patently fantastic behavior: a stuffed donkey copulating with a version of the renowned Jin Mao tower, which until recently was the tallest building in China. The humor is there, mocking the architectural and openly phallic ambition of the tower-and of Chinese construction generally--by reducing it to a size not much larger than the size of the donkey. By itself, the sculpture shifts from humor to something a bit darker and more daring—Donkey is an attempt to reduce desire to its most basic and consequently most forceful by showing off the donkey's erotic relations with a building, which bends at an angle from the animal's attack. Making fun of the epic—and phallic—enterprise of building skyscrapers, Donkey plays with expectations only to subvert them—in this case, the self-evident absurdity of a donkey sexually involved with a copy of the Jin Mao tower reads as a joke about current Chinese ambition (as elsewhere in world myth, the size of the donkey's phallus is part of Chinese folklore, and its stupidity is also common knowledge). Although the allegorical nature of Donkey allows us as viewers to take an amused view of the very direct coupling between building and beast, the values being made fun of are genuine and even serious: the tall, impersonal office towers, caricatures of ambition and wealth, represent a recent and very important change in China's urban landscape, and are found everywhere there.

Zhang Huan's Ash Head No. 1 (Lot 648) concerns a relatively new sequence of ash sculptures; the artist has commented on his use of this new material: "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." Burning incense at a temple accompanies prayers that range the spectrum of desire—from praying for the good health of one's parents to wishing for more wealth. The sculpture is a monumental self-portrait, ending just under the nose; the ash used to construct the head has a ghostly grayish-green color, emphasizing its contemplative spirituality, which is also highlighted by its closed eyes and considerable ears. The quietism apparent in the Ash Head No. 1 shows Zhang Huan at his most spiritual; after the artist had returned to China, watching the many persons burning incense in temples was greatly moving to him. The head also relates, on an art-historical level, to the giant buddhas carved into stone, whose size emphasizes the august grandeur of the Buddha himself. Finally, this striking sculpture connects with Zhang Huan's childhood, when he visited Buddhist shrines and saw and smelled the incense sticks; as the artist grows older, he turns to the past for inspiration. In this work, Zhang Huan has used the self-portrait to imply a reality greater than the self, just as he has used nakedness to suggest innocence and vulnerability. Ash Head No. 1 reminds us that we are all subject to transitory desires and momentary states of being, yet makes something positive out of this view. It also convinces Zhang Huan's audience that his new work has taken a serious, and sincere, turn.