Buddhist influences in Chinese art: Zhang Huan and the

Master’s Degree

in Lingue, economie e istituzioni

dell’Asia e dell’Africa Mediterranea

Final Thesis

Buddhist influences in Chinese art: Zhang Huan and the relationship

with contemporary society

Supervisor

Ch. Prof. Francesca Tarocco

Assistant supervisor

Ch. Prof. Jacopo Scarin

Graduand

Alessia Daisy Lai

Matricolation number

846459

Academic Year

2019 / 2020

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Summary

ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................................... 2

INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................................... 4

佛教对中国艺术的影响：张洹与当代社会的关系 ............................................................................... 7

ZHANG HUAN: AN ARTIST’S BIOGRAPHY THROUGH HIS WORKS .............................................. 10

1.1 Historical and artistic context .......................................................................................................... 10

1.2 Zhang Huan’s childhood and his “Country boy at heart” feeling ...................................................... 14

1.3 Zhang Huan’s studies and his first approach to art ........................................................................... 15

1.4 The performance approach: Angel (1993) ....................................................................................... 16

1.5 Beijing East Village: the development of an experimental artist community ..................................... 19

1.6 The second public performance: 12m2 (1994) ................................................................................. 21

1.7 The link between ‘art for art’s sake’ and performance ...................................................................... 25

1.8 Self-torture and the experiment of 65 Kilos (1994) ............................................................................ 26

1.9 To add one meter to an unknown mountain and To raise the water level in a fishpond: the last performance

pieces in China ..................................................................................................................................... 28

1.10 New York and the ‘hard to acclimatize’ feeling ............................................................................. 32

1.11 My performance series: switching from ‘Local’ to ‘Glocal’ in the artist’s mind .............................. 39

1.12 The artist’s return to China and the establishment of the Shanghai atelier ....................................... 42

1.13 The use of ash as a new material: the expression of Buddhism in Zhang Huan’s works .................. 45

BUDDHISM AND ZHANG HUAN’S ARTWORKS ............................................................................... 48

2.1 Buddhism and contemporary China ................................................................................................. 48

2.2 Zhang Huan’s Buddhism................................................................................................................. 48

2.3 The importance of Tibet .................................................................................................................. 50

2.4 The use of materials: the importance of incense ash ......................................................................... 58

2.5 Work analysis: Pagoda ................................................................................................................... 66

2.6 Work analysis: Zhu Gangqiang ....................................................................................................... 69

2.7 Work analysis: the Poppy flowers series .......................................................................................... 72

2.8 Work analysis: Semele .................................................................................................................... 78

CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................................................... 84

BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................................... 86

SITOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................................ 88

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ABSTRACT

The purpose of this dissertation is to analyse the work of contemporary artist Zhang Huan, focusing

on the close relationship between his artworks and Buddhism. The analysis will start from the first

steps taken by the artist in the Beijing East Side Village and will highlight all the developments of

his art until today, focusing, in particular, on his trips to Tibet and his life in the USA, and to the

artist’s life in connection with the Chinese avant-garde movement and its Buddhist implications.

Below is the list of the books that I used as a reference for the development of this dissertation:

- Dziewior Y., Goldberg, R., Huan, Z., Storr, R., Zhang Huan, London, Phaidon, 2009.

This is the artist’s leading monograph. The book describes the life of the artist since the very

beginning until today, explaining the path he followed, starting with his body performance art until

the most recent Buddhist implications and his future works. It includes the period the artist spent

abroad, in the USA, and then his return to China.

- Jacob, Mary Jane, In the Space of Art: in Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art, Berkeley,

University of California Press, 2004.

This book helped to build a link between the Buddhist religion and its latest developments in

Chinese society, also involving the art industry, and how Chinese society is influenced by the

religion itself.

- Genua, Elena, Reflections on Ash: A Collective Soul, in “Ashman”,n. 23, 2010.

In Ashman, we can find an analysis of the material used by Zhang Huan for his works concerning

Buddha figures. The use of ash is essential to analyze both the decline of statues, the meaning

Zhang Huan gave it and also the artist’s collection.

- Mariani, Amelia, Zhang Huan’s Big Buddha: Ten Years Later, in “Yishu: Journal of

Contemporary Chinese Art”, Volume 11, April 2012, p. 56–61.

- Kwan Chan, Shing, Public Displays of Affliction: On Zhang Huan’s 12m2, in “Yishu:

Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art”, Volume 17, January 2018, p. 97–107.

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- Barlett Voon, Pow, Zhang Huan: Zhu Gangqiang, in “Yishu: Journal of Contemporary

Chinese Art”, Volume 9, January 2010, p. 72–79.

All the essays published on Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art during these years are a

fundamental tool to examine the perception of the figure of the artist from an objective point of

view. Moreover, they offer a detailed study of Zhang Huan’s works, from the first performance

pieces to the changeling years after his return to China, where Zhang approached religion, as

expressed with his art.

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INTRODUCTION

Due to changing geopolitical dynamics in recent years and to globalization, the contemporary

Chinese art world is highly fragmented. In the final decade of the last century, Chinese artists

began to experiment, as well as revive, traditional art practices. At the same time, Buddhism also

experienced a revival. This was the context in which Zhang Huan, one of the most representative

artists of the contemporary Chinese art world, developed his art.

The first section describes the art scene in today's Chinese society. For both art and China, the year

1989 closed an era and opened a new one. The Tiananmen massacre marked the end of a decade of

relatively open political, intellectual, and artistic exploration. At the same time, the implementation

of the reforms led to a new era of development, globalization, and personal power.

Artists used all the forms they could to express their understanding of conceptual art, with

performance pieces, paintings, photography, installations and, video art. This was aimed at getting

a reaction from the audience, engaging directly with society. Avant-garde artists saw themselves as

modern cultural pioneers, developing their works to fight for social reform, and rebelling, in a

visual way, against the past. Avant-garde artists felt just as pioneers while approaching to new art

techniques. Their works were the perfect representation of the social reforms fights, rebellion and

contrast with the previous ideology. They criticized ideology, which was based on a state-dominant

theory, striving to express their concerns. A milestone event in the development of experimental

avant-garde was the formation of Beijing East Village (北京东村). The Village, in the early 1990s,

was the essential expression of an avant-garde artistic community. It was located in the eastern part

of the Capital, far from the historical and cultural center in the city. It was formed by a group of

people, especially artists who decided to move together in a village in the outskirts of Beijing. The

name was chosen to take as inspiration the East Village in Manhattan, which was, since the 1950s,

a popular destination for migrant workers and a class of emergent artists, attracted by the cheap

rent prices. During the following years, the Manhattan East Village began to attract a class of

artists for the same reason. Zhang Huan was an active member of the Beijing East Village

community. The artist had earned a B.A., in 1988, at Henan University, and then an M.A., in 1993,

at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.

Zhang was attracted to the avant-garde, and, thanks to it, he became closer to the East Village,

where he started his career in collaboration with his colleagues. His first works were surprisingly

provocative and transgressive: his performance pieces, during which he was often naked and

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undergoing physically painful experiences, result as the best way to express all the inner thoughts

of the artist. Zhang Huan experimented with solo performance pieces using his own body, as in 12

Square Metres (1994): in which Zhang Huan covered himself with fish oil before stand in a public

latrine for hours. during this performance piece, he covered himself in fish oil and honey and sat

stock-still in a public latrine for several hours while insects crawled over him. At the same time, he

started to involve several people, most of whom were artists as well, to set up several group

performance pieces. Among the most famous and impressive, we find To Add One Metre to an

Anonymous Mountain (1995). During this collective performance, the various artists (nine,

including Zhang Huan) gathered at the top peak of a hill close to Beijing. They removed their

clothes, and one by one laid on [top of] one another, in order to reach the height of one meter.

Zhang Huan is not just a performer but also a versatile multi-media artist. He has experimented

with photography, calligraphy, and sculpture. Among the original artistic images he produced in

this working period, there is also a mixture of various art forms, for example, calligraphy,

performance, and photography. During “Inside Out,” a major exhibition held in New York in 1998,

Zhang Huan’s works were included in the most influent representations of the contemporary

Chinese avant-garde. In the same year, he decided to move to the USA. His works from those

years, until his return to China in 2006, were also experimental, but with a different point of view.

He continued to use body performance art as the highest expression of himself, but, at the same

time, he started to use different art forms on a more regular basis. After spending several years in

the USA, he decided to return to China in 2006. By that time, he already was one of the most

important representatives of Chinese avant-garde and continued to work in his brand-new atelier in

Minhang, a suburban district in Shanghai, where he still lives and works.

When Zhang Huan returned to China from New York in 2005, his desire to explore Buddhism and

its meanings became more intense. During his trips to Tibet, other regions of China, and Southeast

Asia, he had the opportunity to discover some broken pieces of copper, gold and several precious

materials that formerly constituted some Buddha statues damaged and destroyed during the decade

of the Cultural Revolution.

Since he started to use Buddhism as a form of redemption and inspiration for his art, Buddhist

iconography has started to dominate his works. Moreover, he has made extensive use of incense

ash, seen as a symbolic material from Buddhist worshippers. To him, ash sculptures are a form of

collective blessing and reflect the memory and soul of Chinese people. For Zhang Huan, each of

the ash buddha he made represents the prayers, thoughts, and hopes of humankind.

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In the third section of this dissertation, after describing the main works produced by Zhang Huan,

we will focus on some of the artist’s works, with an eye on their relationship with Buddhist

elements. These works include “Zhu Gangqiang,” “Poppy flowers,” and his musical drama,

“Semele.” Each of them was selected for its close relationship with Buddhism. Every work is a

different way to express religious ideas using a different art form each time, including painting,

sculpture, and opera. Each work clearly shows the close relationship the artist has with religion,

and his intense desire to express it.

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佛教对中国艺术的影响：张洹与当代社会的关系

近年来，随着地缘政治动态的变化和全球化的发展，当代中国艺术产生了几

个分裂，并由此发展出了多种表现形式。

上世纪末十年起，在政治和经济形势的影响下，中国艺术家开始尝试新文化

启蒙运动，试图恢复文化大革命后的艺术传统并向西方艺术靠拢。这不但推动了知识

分子运动，也成为了中国现代化的里程碑。同时，佛教在 20 世纪 70 年代后的改革时

期后复兴，并盛行至今。

张洹是中国当代先锋运动中最具代表性的艺术家之一，本论文将着重讨论他的艺

术发展背景，并对其作品与佛教的关系进行反思。分析将以艺术家从北京东村至今的

生活经历为基础，结合他在西藏、美国的旅行生活，解释中国先锋运动艺术家的生活

与佛教的关系。

本论文第一章将着重于中国当代社会中的艺术背景。对于艺术和中国而言，1989

年既是结束也是开始：六四天安门事件标志着十年政治、文化和艺术探索开放时期的

结束，同时也标志着改革的开始、全球化和个人力量新时代的开创。

艺术家们通过表演、绘画、摄影、装置和视频艺术的创作，竭尽所能地去表

达他们对概念艺术的理解，从而引发观众的强烈反应，直接接触社会。先锋艺术家们

将自己视为文化现代先锋，希望通过有叛逆外观的作品反抗社会改革，批评由国家主

导的长期压制个性化发展的意识形态。

在试验性先锋艺术的发展中，北京东村的成立是一个里程碑。北京东村建于 20

世纪 90 年代初，位于远离城市历史文化中心的北京东部。“东村”的名字来自于曼

哈顿东城，一群艺术家集体移居到了这个“村子”，住进简陋的农民工房中，将其变

为了当前最大的先锋艺术社区。

在社区众多代表艺术家中，很快出现了张洹的身影。他先在在河南大学完成

了文学学士学位（1988 年），后在北京中央美术学院取得了硕士学位（1993 年）。

在先锋艺术的魅力下，他逐渐靠近北京东村并与伙伴在那里开始演出。他们初期的演

出极具挑逗和侵犯性，展现大量的裸露和精神扭曲，这是他认为表达内心想法最好的

方式。

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张洹也曾尝试过只使用身体的单人表演，如 12 平方米（1994 年）：表演期间，

他用鱼油和蜂蜜覆盖全身，在公共厕所中静坐了几个小时，让昆虫在身上肆意爬过。

同时，他也组织有他人参与的多人表演，参与者大多数同为艺术家。其中最出名并令

人印象深刻的有“为匿名山增加一米”（1995）：他和另外九人在山顶脱掉衣服叠在

一起，直到达到一米的高度。

张洹不仅是一个表演者，更是一个多面体大师，他的艺术形式包括摄影、书法和

雕塑。他在身体和脸部进行书法创作，有时甚至完全遮盖了皮肤特征。在颇具影响力

的 1998 年纽约展览“Inside Out”期间，张洹的作品被列为中国当代先锋艺术最具

影响力的作品之一。同年，出于对自由创作的向往，他决定前往美国。这期间，他的

作品受到了来自各个观点的审视，在继续用身体表现自我的同时，他加入了不同的艺

术处理方式。在美国度过几年之后，他在 2006 年决定回国，此时，他已经成为国内

几大先锋成员之一，并在上海郊区闵行成立工作室，在那里继续生活创作至今。

除了艺术，张洹职业生涯的另一个核心就是佛教以及他在该领域的作品，也就是

本论文第二章的重要内容。

2005 年从纽约回国后，张洹对佛教的探索也到达了另一个高度。在西藏、

中国和东南亚旅行期间，他发现了大量在文化大革命时期被破坏的铜、青铜和金佛

像。

“我的作品与精神同在。虽然我相信自己早期的表演作品也包含冥想元素，

但成为佛教徒之后，我创造了更多直接以佛为主题的作品。在这些作品中，你可以更

明显地感受到这种元素和更深刻的精神意义"

从那以后，他开始把佛教当作艺术的一种救赎和灵感，在作品和表演中加入

佛教人物。其中较为有趣的是他经常在创作中使用灰烬，甚至用它造了一尊佛像，因

为灰烬象征着祈祷者的希望，他认为由灰烬雕塑代表着中国人民集体的祝福、记忆、

灵魂和最终的瓦解。

张洹在灰烬佛像的创作中达到了一种至高的境界，“在头脑风暴之后，我的思绪

达到了前所未有的平静，在这个状态下我感到升华、幻觉、敬畏、无欲和无性别，似

乎灵魂和灰烬一起飞散了。”张洹的灰烬作品展现了他对私人生活和社会历史的挖

掘，也体现了集体记忆和经历。

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讲完张洹主要杰作后，论文第三章将着重于其作品与佛教元素的紧密联系，

并着重分析四个作品。

涉及作品为：“朱刚前”，“罂粟花”，对不同城市佛像的分析（柏林佛像，佛

罗伦萨佛像，佛罗伦萨佛像），以及歌剧“Semele”。从绘画到雕塑再到歌剧，这几

部作品分别用了不同的艺术形式，强烈地表达了艺术家与佛教的亲密关系。

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ZHANG HUAN: AN ARTIST’S BIOGRAPHY THROUGH HIS

WORKS

1.1 Historical and artistic context

To understand the evolution of contemporary Chinese art is essential to affirm that several of

the main Chinese artistic lives have been profoundly altered by the reforms led by Deng

Xiaoping (鄧小平) in the latest decades of the previous century. These changes gave artists

more opportunities to learn from different sources worldwide, as well as the ability to work

independently of the state commission and the Socialist Realist style, which was the primary

expression of art in China’s revolutionary era. Social Realist Style developed since the 1920s,

representing the embodiment of Chinese intellectuals’ sense of duty to nation and society.1

The style took its main inspiration from the Social Realism developed in the Soviet Union,

with the scope to emphasize a utopian reality. In 1986, Gao Minglu summed up the main

characteristics of this artistic trend:

In rational painting, the figures are very mechanical. You cannot determine who they are. It is almost as

if they have no relationship with reality. There was an appeal for ‘modernization’ at the time, the pursuit

of a sense of transcendence, a desire for entry into international modernization. This desire led to an

affirmation of their own cultural identity, an affirmation that was, to a certain extent, abstract, rather

than concrete.2

The end of the Cultural Revolution, along with the death of Mao Zedong (毛澤東), led to the

emergence of a new artistic generation that embraced western Modern Art. At the same time,

the Chinese avant-garde movement quickly grew, becoming more and more important,

developing a high sense of criticism towards the classical approach to art in China. Due to

these reasons, a profusion of different styles and experimental tendencies subsequently

emerged.3

Chinese art in this period embraces and resumes the radical changes of a culture that takes

back the patterns, images, and notions acquired from both a secular tradition and the West.

The artists reinterpret the original meaning of art, claiming their difference, raised most often

in cultural nationalism. After 1979, art in China could be considered as a space where two

1 Liu, D., Yinghua Lu, C., From the issue of art to the issue of position: the echos of socialist realism, Tate Research Publication, 2018. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid.

https://www.artsy.net/gene/socialist-realism

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main aspects of Chinese history of the end of the 20th century met, under both a political

orthodoxy and a multi-cultural atmosphere, between indigenous traditions and imported

cultural practice, while questioning the aesthetic criteria of the socialist period. 4

In these years, during the late 1970s and 1980s, an essential source of inspiration from the

West reached China, with a significant opening to western books, sources, and information.

The impact that this new opening had in the following years in the Chinese art scene was

extreme and led to an impressively subversive and exuberant creative energy.5

This vast movement led to the production of an ample iconography and revealed itself as the

scene of strong opposition to the status quo. It would be difficult to understand, for example,

the emergence of Pop Art (for example, the criticism of mass consumption, represented by

the ironic exaltation of Maoism) or the popularity of kitsch without taking into account the

Chinese cult for the post-revolutionary sentimentality.6

The first important exhibition of artworks by avant-garde artists, China/Avant-garde, took

place at the Beijing Palace of Fine Arts in 1989 and was a pioneering event. The artistic

community, on the eve of the repression of the Tian’anmen movement, has given its

meaning to ten years under the seal of a self-proclaimed avant-garde, claiming its total

rupture and its dissociation from the traditional world of art, and in particular that of

painting.7 Since then, exhibitions and the new artistic professions have been shaping the new

face of a society willing to legitimize both Chinese identity and its contacts with the outside.

China/Avant-garde exhibition included 293 paintings, sculptures and videos by 186 artists

(including Wang Guangyi 王广义 , Xu Bing 徐冰，Wu Shanzhuan 吳山專 , Huang

Yongping 黄永砯, and Gu Wenda 谷文达).8 The event, which was a collective idea in order

to create a convention called "modern Chinese art" (Dangdai yishu yantaohui 当代艺术研讨

会), was the result of a cooperation between three art critics. They were: Gao Minglu 高名潞

who, at the time, directed the magazine “Meishu” 美术, Peng De 彭德, the Vice-President of

4 Lincot, E., Contemporary Chinese Art Under Deng Xiaoping, in “China Perspectives”, 2004. 5 Lee, C., Chinese Avant-Garde Art: Body and Spirit Struggle for a New Cultural Identity, in “ARAS Connection”, 2011. 6 Lincot, E., Contemporary Chinese Art Under Deng Xiaoping, in “China Perspectives”, 2004. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid.

https://post.at.moma.org/profiles/1137-wu-shanzhuan

https://post.at.moma.org/profiles/1137-wu-shanzhuan

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the Research Institute of the Hubei artists Association and Li Xianting 栗宪庭 the co-

founder and publisher of “Zhongguo meishubao” 中国美术报.9

After this exhibition, avant-garde artists started to see themselves in a new light, that being

one of power and importance to enlighten the people, while fighting for their ideals (from the

social reforms to the break with the past recent history). At the same time, the artists started

to criticize the contemporary ideology of the State because of its refuse to understand and

promote the individuality of the “self.” For all these reasons China/Avant-garde exhibited to

its public neither traditional Chinese painting or calligraphy but, instead, it best summarized

the climate of tension that had been dividing the artistic scene for several years.10

China/Avant-garde was the very first national exhibition of experimental art (Shiyan meishu

实验美术)11, but, due to the intensity of the contrast between the entities opposing abstract

organisms against concrete manifestations, it was censured after two days, using one of the

artists, Xiao Lu 肖鲁, as a pretext, as she shot a bullet into her sculpture.12 The event

anticipated the repression of the reformists of Tian’anmen Square, which took place just

three months later.

Since then, exhibitions have been offering a space for the transformation of traditional

categories in the field of the visual arts. Just as in the United States and Europe almost forty

years earlier.13 There was a breakdown of the framework that disrupted the elements of a

visual language, which, in the past, had granted visual arts such as calligraphy and painting,

their specificity as a field. Other examples would be arts such as: materials, hooking,

exhibition venues, diffusion methods borrowed from Western practices that gained a new

influence of Chinese culture. These pieces beg the question as to what is the role of

exhibitions in the first place.14

Due to these changes and proliferation of experiments, a growing number of artists

renounced the traditional forms of art, as for example common exhibitions inside museums,

which no longer had a leading role in the presentation of pieces. The cultural and political

implications and the architecture of the prototype of the museum were contested: artists

9 Lincot, E., Contemporary Chinese Art Under Deng Xiaoping, in “China Perspectives”, 2004. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid.

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turned to the dilapidated parts of the city, to industrial wastelands, and to an up-and-coming

urban space that at the same time upset the choice of exhibition venues.15

Experimental art exhibitions in China were discovered by Western, Taiwanese, and Hong

Kong art professionals in the early 1990s. The interest of foreign media for the Chinese art

scene was justified by the great success of China’s New Art, post-1989, an international

exhibition organized by the critic Li Xianting (栗宪庭) and Johnson Chang from Hong Kong

Hanart TZ Gallery in 1993, but also by the first notable participation of young Chinese

artists at the Biennale di Venezia in the same year. 16After 1989, pieces were no longer

exhibited in art galleries and commercial spaces, but in the private spaces of houses or

diplomatic chambers. From 1993, the galleries affiliated with institutions, such as the Central

Academy of Fine Arts (中央美术学院) in Beijing, became major places of experimental

exhibitions in the capital, mainly because of the spirit of openness shown by the directors of

these institutions.

In avant-garde art, the representation and its elements referred to the subject as much as to

the site where the piece was created, consulted, even shut down and remade. The fact that art

pieces and exhibitions were constantly evolving offered the exhibition’s organizers multiple

opportunities to circumvent censorship by, for example, transposing their exposure from

China to one or more foreign countries. Censorship or self-censorship that resulted in the

cancellation of an event are all significant features of a culture kept within ideological

boundaries that were seen as constraints at that time.17

In conclusion, during the late 1990s and until the present decade, Chinese art experienced the

use of new media, such as photography, video, digital art, performance, and installation. The

richness and extensiveness of technical experimentations were not always reflected in the

importance of the subjects treated, which often seemed unimportant or were selected with

the aim of pure sensationalism. In the end, the development of the new artistic movement,

together with the spread of video art and the use of photographic supports to document

performance pieces, led to the possibility for artists to express their thoughts. This could be

possible while experimenting with the combinations of all of these new instruments along

with a new willingness to create a distinctive form of artistic expression.

15 Lincot, E., Contemporary Chinese Art Under Deng Xiaoping, in “China Perspectives”, 2004. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid.

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1.2 Zhang Huan’s childhood and his “Country boy at heart” feeling

Zhang Huan (張洹), whose real name is Zhang Dongming (張东明), which means “Eastern

Brightness,” was born in 1965 in Anyang (安阳), a city in Henan Province (河南省) in

China, a crossroad between the North and the South of China. The place where he was born

deeply influenced his way to perceive life: since the very beginning, he defined himself as a

country boy at heart18, since he spent his first years of childhood at his grandmother's house,

located in the countryside, while his parents were still in Anyang. Living his entire

childhood in this environment led him to express himself through drawing. In these, one can

spot many references to rural life, thanks to the use of animal motifs and family portraits.

During these years, Zhang’s family struggled to earn a living. Those were also the beginning

years of the Cultural Revolution and Zhang, who was raised by his grandmother in the

countryside, grew up very poor. As he explained in an interview with Rose-Lee Goldberg,

“most of my childhood memories are associated with death, the death of my grandma and

our neighbours, and the burial rituals. My grandmother died suddenly, her body was placed

in our living room for seven days of mourning, a countryside custom”. 19

Eventually Zhang moved to his parent’s house in the city of Anyang, an urban center with

more than three million citizens. This change was not shocking for Zhang Huan, but it

influenced his first approach to art. When he attended primary school he could not find the

right approach to focus on the study:

I couldn’t concentrate, and I think it had something to do with (…) my very natural bodily connection to

the countryside. (…) For me to make that transition to the ‘city’ and being confined in the space of a

school was very difficult. I just couldn’t get over my connection to the nature of my childhood. 20

Due to his inability to concentrate, this was the right moment for Zhang to start drawing,

coming closer, for the first time in his life, to art. His first influences were primarily Soviet

realism, but, as mentioned before, his first artistic outcome was closely related to his roots,

for what concerns both subjects and materials.

18 Goldberg, R., Huan, Z., Zhang Huan, Londra, Phaidon, 2009, p. 9. 19 Ibid, p. 40. 20 Ibid, p. 9.

15

1.3 Zhang Huan’s studies and his first approach to art

Zhang did not experience close contact with western influences until he moved to Beijing.

This late approach is due to his university studies: from 1984 to 1988 he trained in painting

and drawing, together with art history, at the Henan University in Kaifeng. It was in this

specific moment that Zhang came across the paintings by Rembrandt and Jean-François

Millet, whose works are representative of French naturalist and realist style. European,

especially French, realist movement had the aim to promote the concept of “l'art pour

l'homme,” where art was a tool for political and social issues. 21 Also, Zhang Huan

graduation piece, representing a mother nursing her baby with a bowl of cherries, recalled

those western influences. After graduating in Kaifeng, Zhang did not immediately begin to

produce and represent his art, but he spent the following years teaching art and western art

history at the Zhengzhou College of Education. As his teaching background suggested, this

was the moment for Zhang Huan to approach Western art. Even if his drawing production

was not directly influenced by it, the artist’s background already included Western art that

allowed him to teach it.

After three years spent in Kaifeng, he moved to Beijing where he changed his name. Zhang

Huan moved to Beijing in 1991, when he started attending an advanced training program at

the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), among the most famous Academies of the

country in this major. In the capital, he got his M.A. in painting at the China Central

Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1993, focusing on the European classical tradition. Due

also to this approach he began to work for one month at a commercial painting company in

Beijing, where he had to reproduce copies of Degas' works.

After completing his studies at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, he produced, as

the final work of his course, a mix of performance and work that incorporated salvaged

objects. The result of this work took the name of The Third leg, 1993. In this project, Zhang

Huan used one leg he found walking on the street as a prosthetic limb to be photographed

while lying on the back. Looking backward, Zhang declared in an interview 22 that this

particular one was his first work where he used the body consciously transformed in work

material:

21 Goldberg, R., Huan, Z., Zhang Huan, Londra, Phaidon, 2009, p. 23. 22 Dziewior, Y., Zhang Huan, Londra, Phaidon, 2009. p. 42.

16

One day, riding my bicycle from the city to my painting studio, I found a leg from a mannequin on the

street. Just one leg, a woman’s leg. I took it to my studio, and experimented with taping the prosthetic

leg to my body. That was the first performance experience for me. It was an important moment; I

discovered the body as an important part of my art. The body is the first language for me. The body is

immediate. You can feel it. You can’t feel by drawing.23

Right after The Third leg project, Huan started to include physical experience in his art,

combining it with objects, as was the case with another early work: installations made from

cupboards boxes in which baby dolls were stacked, connected with tubes in one case (Angel

1, 1992) or covered with black paint (Angel 2, 1992). Both of these projects anticipated

Zhang Huan’s first public performance piece.

1.4 The performance approach: Angel (1993)

In the same year, an event led to a life-changing point in Zhang Huan’s works: the first

public performance and his general approach to it as a new form of expressive art.

Performance as a new artistic movement spread among Chinese artists around 1985: some of

them began to include performance pieces as an integrated part of their unofficial

exhibitions, such as the Three Step Studio in Shanxi province, the Rhinoceros Painting

Group in Shandong province, and the M Group in Shanghai. Subsequently, some of the

exponents of the Xiamen Dada Group as Wu Shanzhuan (吳山專), Song Yongping (宋永

平), Huang Yongping (黄永砯) occasionally involved live performance while presenting

their current projects. Despite all the effort and the different representations which included

performance as an active part of art, it was only after 1990 that it emerged as a specialized

form of art promoted by the avant-garde artists of the time.

In China, the term used for expressing performance art is "Xingwei Yishu” (行为艺术),

which could be translated into English as "Behavioural Art." The “Behaviour” is hereby

referred to not only a physical action or way to be but also to the individual “self” of the

artists expressing their moral sense and thoughts to a community and society. This approach

to art is more understandable considering the Confucian tradition that led the Chinese society

until the last century. In Confucianism, individual behavior is not contemplated, not existing,

23 Jiae, K., Theme, Spring 2005, USA, Premier Issue, Spring 2005.

17

since behaviors, all together, are the only possible reflection of the mutual relationships of

the community.24

This concept was supported by Gao Minglu, who gave to the Chinese performance a social

significance:

The social content in performance is always present regardless of the artist attempts to express certain

social contents or not in his/her specific performance work. While other works expressed in more

traditional art forms, such as painting and sculpture, required some audience sophistication, the power of

performance art is able to communicate with its audience through a much more direct and

comprehensible way through its use of the human body. 25

The power of performance is its ability to engage with the audience directly. These are the

reasons why, according to Gao, it was forbidden in China. However, this type of taboo or

ban has effectively encouraged artists to choose the performance art medium to express their

social critiques.26

Zhang Huan developed his consciousness about performance in this context and has been

considered by critics one of the most influential – and youngest – performance artist in the

1990s. The first approach was on the occasion of an exhibition opening at the National Art

Museum of China in Beijing. Zhang Huan, who was invited to participate, presented an

outstanding and impressing performance. Few days before the opening, the museum

announced that only paintings were eligible to participate in the exhibition, cutting out every

other kind of art representation. Due to this, Huan organized his performance just outside the

museum entrance. He presented himself dipping a doll into a paint bucket, both of them

covered in red painting containing fragments of toy babies as to signify an aborted baby.

Then, during the performance, he assembled all the pieces that he had dropped onto the

blanket into a new baby, which he then set in the middle of the exhibition hall, as a sort of

painting. All the interactions between Zhang and the doll were reported on a white sheet,

which immediately became red as the body of the artist. Through this work as a social

performance, Zhang wanted to express the social conditions of China. He took inspiration

from the women’s figures who were right in front of his experience: fellow artists, friends,

relatives, different personalities who were compelled to abort in order to respect the one-

24 Gao, M., Pilgrimage to Santiago, in “Zhang Huan Official Website”, 2000. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid.

18

child-only policy of Chinese society. Even if the blood used was fake, the scene was gory

enough to compel the security guards to stop Zhang, who had also to write an apology to the

museum. Even though Zhang Huan did it for the sake of his fellow artists, but he has not

been able to perform in a public gallery or museum in China since this date.27

Image 1.1: Zhang Huan, Angel, 1993, Beijing, Pace Gallery

From that moment on, also following the path of fellow artists such as Marina Abramovic in

Yugoslavia or Ilya Kabakov in the URSS, performance art became for him a way to express

challenging ideas into less democratic regimes. Even in this early work, the formal criteria as

working with blood-like liquid on a piece white fabric was an interesting choice: Zhang

involved himself deeply into his work and exposed himself to extreme situations that led to a

subjective and social experience at the same time.

I discovered that my body could become my language, it was the closest thing to who I was and it

allowed me to become known to others. I had been struggling with how to move from the two-

27 Yeon, K.Y., Zhang Huan, Hamburg, Kunstverein, 2003.

19

dimensional to the three-dimensional and then I discovered this new vehicle, my body (…). It was a

kind of personal necessity. 28

After the “Angel” performance, the directors of the museum decided to close the exhibition

for which the performance was designed. Due to this reaction, Zhang decided to move to a

more intimate and restricted place, where, together with other artists who were

experimenting with the same situation, he could recreate a fitting venue where to express

their art.29

1.5 Beijing East Village: the development of an experimental artist

community

Between 1993 and 1998, Zhang decided to move in and present the majority of his

performance works in a now demolished bohemian community called Beijing East Village

(北京东村), which was located on the outskirts of the Capital city. He, followed by other

artists, decided to live in this poor quarter on the border of the capital, not only for financial

reasons but also for experiments with a China-version of New York’s East Village of the

1980s.

In that period, Zhang Huan and other like-minded artists such as Ma Liuming (马六明) and

Zhu Ming (朱冥) staged a diverse range of controversial performance pieces, creating, from

the very beginning, a place where their bodies became their primary medium of artistic

expression.30 The art performances at Beijing East Village followed the growing attention of

experimental artists who swapped “art for art’s sake” for a new type of embodied

experience.31 Even if the situation started to improve in a few years, the way the public

reacted to Angel suggested that it was necessary to continue to work on new experimental art

by retiring to private ateliers and rooms.32 The village, called Danshanzhuang (但山庄), and

populated mainly by migrant workers, was informally renamed by a group of artists who

were residing in the community at that time. Zhang Huan has stated that many of his

28 Artspace Editors, New York Made Me Sick at Heart: Performance artist Zhang Huan reflects on how America made him more Chinese, in “ArtSpace”, 2017, https://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/book_report/new_york_made_me_sick_at_heart_zhang_huan-55042, 10 July 2019 29 Dziewior, Y., Zhang Huan, London, Phaidon, 2009, p. 43. 30 Kwan Chan, Shing, Public Displays of Affliction: On Zhang Huan’s 12m2, in “Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art”, Volume 17, January 2018, p. 97–107. 31 Ibid. 32 Dziewior, Y., Zhang Huan, London, Phaidon, 2009, p. 43.

https://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/book_report/new_york_made_me_sick_at_heart_zhang_huan-55042


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performances were carried out to reflect his personal experiences at Beijing East Village.

This representation of Beijing East Village could be interpreted as a “self-consciously

bohemian and marginal artistic enclave.” 33 The establishment of a bohemian community

depends on the formation of a marginal artistic community that declares itself as a

replacement to a former avant-garde and is reborn as an urban art district in which the spaces

and lives of artists are displayed and consumed. In the same period, just as New York East

Village was replaced by the redeveloped Greenwich Village, Beijing East Village was, in a

few years, replaced by the now famous and redeveloped 798 Art District.

Karen Smith, an art critic and writer, based in Beijing, while describing Beijing East Village

in the early 1990s, says: “Waste accumulates by the side of the small ponds. This pollutes

the water, generating noxious fumes in the summer. Raw sewage flows directly into the

water. Slothful, threadbare dogs roam the narrow lanes between houses.”34

Zhang Huan has stated that many of his performances were carried out to reflect his personal

experiences at Beijing East Village. The village, populated mainly by migrant workers, was

informally renamed by the group of artists who were residing in the community at that time.

This was the climax of art that Zhang Huan started to experiment with more intensity as his

expression of art: as mentioned before, he studied at university where he received the most

classical of the preparation, that made him come closer to the first expression of himself

through sculpture and painting. In contraposition with it, when he moved to the East Side

Village, his approach to contemporary art changed, letting him understand that continuing to

emphasize art using the classical tools was no longer enough. This was the period when

Zhang Huan started to experiment with new expressions.

During this period, the artist groups who lived in the Village tried to escape from standard

forms of art, managing to use their bodies to state their inner thoughts and their conception

of the environment around them and its existence to cause some social reactions, which led

to the creation of an Avant-Garde movement and approach in Chinese contemporary art.

Since Zhang Huan approached performance art, he aimed to discover more about the

transition phase he was living spiritually, and this was the perfect field for experimenting

with his body.

33 Kwan Chan, Shing, Public Displays of Affliction: On Zhang Huan’s 12m2, in “Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art”, Volume 17, January 2018, p. 97–107 34 Wu, H., Transience, Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century, Chicago, The Smart Art Museum, 1999.

21

During those years, the resident artists of the Village lived in poor and underdeveloped

conditions, but due to these, they were inspired and willing to find their resisting force.

Zhang Huan used his direct body experience and interpretation intending to communicate

with society and himself. While searching for this, he found a way to express his concept of

artistic creation. By becoming themselves art, the artists who operate in this context, make

disinterested aesthetic judgments of the art object absurd or irrelevant. Because the

"artwork" is also a sentient, reasoning being, body art brings moral, ethical, and political

issues into play.35

1.6 The second public performance: 12m2 (1994)

Zhang Huan presented, the year right after his first work, Angel, one of his most memorable

live performances, staged in a public toilet in Beijing East Village. The performance took the

name of 12m2 (1994). The stage of the performance was a public toilet in the heart of

Beijing East Village, a place that represented everyday life, and was documented both by

video and photographs. The scene represented was the artist sitting in the middle of this

small and claustrophobic unsanitary public lavatory, on whose wall was written: “Please pay

attention to the public hygiene” (请讲究公共卫生). While he was sitting in this toilet, his

body was covered with a mixture of honey and fish sauce, all over the artist’s upper-body,

including his head, face, and mouth.

The substance soon started to attire swarming flies as a form of disease expression. The

entire scene was reproduced with a monochrome photograph, where Zhang Huan and his

figure was clearly in contrast to the unsanitary setting. The sculptural positioning of the body

gives the shots a meditative, statuesque character, in sharp contrast to the artist, who is

engulfed by buzzing flies, which at this moment represent a common vector of disease. A

group of fellow artists arranged the photo-shoot, among them, there were Ai Weiwei (艾未

未), who was at times stopping by Beijing East Village, and the photographer Rong Rong

(荣荣). According to Rong Rong, Zhang Huan remained unflinching through the entire

performance. Even when flies began to land on his nude body, he still sat as motionless as a

sculpture.36

35 Heartney, E., Zhang Huan: Altered States, New York, Charta and Asia Society, 2007. 36 Ibid.

22

Image 1.2: Rong Rong, Zhang Huan “12mq2”, 1994, Beijing, Art media resoruces

Approximately one hour after letting all the mosquitoes bite his body, Zhang Huan stood up

and sauntered out of the cubicle, walking directly toward the nearest pond, right after the

toilet, where he slowly entered in the cold water, letting all the insects flying away from him

one by one. Among the photos taken by Rong Rong, we can also find a rarely reproduced

series that shows the culmination of the performance: as the water gets deep, the body of

Zhang Huan disappears, leaving just some ripples on the surface of the water itself.

Zhang Huan continued to represent and transform the performance in a very personal and

subjective way: he succeeded in this intent, thanks to his primary source of inspiration: his

biography and culture, which was a starting point for a narrative structure. “The artist is

always concerned with creating universally valid experiences, and he tries to clarify them for

himself through his extreme use of his own body.”37

12m2 was often compared to an abhorrent experience, where the term abjection means the

state of experiencing something unpleasant, debasing, or traumatic to the maximum degree.

“In simpler terms, abjection is a bleak state of mind, a primal sense of detestation and

aversion. In this regard, Zhang Huan’s exercise in 12m2 can be considered an abject art

37 Hung, W., Rong Rong’s East Village 1993–1998, Chicago, Art Media Resources, 2003, p. 72.

23

performance, as the artist underwent immense physical and psychological distress purely for

the sake of his work”.38

Abject art is a linguistic concept that was developed in the 1980s, by Julia Kristeva. She

introduced it in her book “Powers of Horror.”39 The concept behind the abjection is the

meaning of ‘the state of being cast off.’ The abjection is not related to just one body part or

function, but it covers them all: they could all be accountable for any impure use or display

of the human body.

As Julia Kristeva wrote in the introduction of the “Powers of Horror,” the description of

“Ab-jection” is:

There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that

seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the

tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated (…) But simultaneously,

just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is

condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places

the one haunted by it literally beside himself.40

For Julia Kristeva, the abjection buried consciousness of the individual41, which emerge in

the individual in correlation with all the bodily functions, or aspects of the body, that are

deemed impure or inappropriate for public display or discussion.42

As already said, the performance made by Zhang Huan was documented by the artist’s

colleagues, Rong Rong and Ai Weiwei, who was disgusted at the sight of the setting and by

the swarming flies. As Rong Rong recalled in a letter to his sister, he also suffered from this

horrendous experience and went through an unsettling emotional state of repulsion:

11:30 am yesterday. (…) In a few minutes, swarms of flies started covering his body. I had put on a

mouth cover that I had prepared the day before. You know how stinky that public toilet is. On top of that,

it was more than 38 degrees’ centigrade yesterday. I don’t know how I managed to take pictures in those

conditions. (…) Holding my camera, I felt that I couldn’t breathe, it felt like the end of life.43

Zhang Huan also talked about this experience, explaining the reasons and sensations, which

led him to represent such a performance:

38 Kwan Chan, S., Public Displays of Affliction: On Zhang Huan’s 12m2, In “Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art”, Volume 17, January 2018, p. 97–107. 39 Art term, Abject Art, n.d., https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/a/abject-art, 7 July 2019 40 Kristeva, J., Powers of horror: an essay on abjection, New York, Columbia University Press., 1982. 41 Willette, J., Kristeva, J., and abjection, In “Art History Unstuffed”, 2013, https://arthistoryunstuffed.com/julia-kristeva-and-abjection/, 7 July 2019 42 Art term, Abject Art, n.d., https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/a/abject-art, 7 July 2019 43 Hung, W., Rong Rong’s East Village, 1993–1998, p. 70.

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/a/abject-art

https://arthistoryunstuffed.com/julia-kristeva-and-abjection/

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/a/abject-art

24

12m2 is the area of the public toilets that are used every day in China. One day after lunch, I went to the

toilet as usual. The sun had just come out following a rainstorm, but there was no place to stand in the

toilet for it was flooded. I had to bike to another public toilet in the village. It was relatively cleaner.

When I stepped in, thousands of flies swarmed toward me and I still had to squat down. This was my

life, and no one could experience it but me. I was determined to make artworks about my life and

suddenly came up with the idea of 12m2.44

Zhang Huan described the performance as a raw and cruel experience:

I just felt that everything began to vanish from my sight. Life seemed to be leaving me far in the

distance. I had no concrete thought except that my mind was completely empty. I could only feel my

body, more and more flies landing and crawling over my nose, eyes, ears, forehead, every part of me. I

could feel them eating the liquid on my body. Some were stuck but did not stop eating. I could even tell

that they were more interested in the fish liquid than the honey because there were more flies on the left

part of my body, where that liquid was.45

“Abject Art” is not the only term used by critics to describe the kind of art representation

held by Zhang Huan in 12mq2. A significant part of the artistic community remains quite

critical towards this performance. Art critic Ellen Pearlman labeled 12m2 and his other

performances “shock art”. The term “shock art” has a negative connotation, as it is generally

adopted to categorize works of art that generate “shock for shock’s sake”. 46 German

philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) makes a similar reference about the impact of

the “disgust” feeling that generates an adverse reaction. He argued that disgust as a repellent

sensation breaks through the oppositional dichotomy of art and nature, real and imaginary,

and, hence, unsettles the condition for the possibility of aestheticizing disgust.47

At the same time disgust is also a distinctive pattern of human life, staying on the boundary

between conscious pattern and unconscious impulse48. Disgust can yet have the power to

process society taboos and recall instinctive impulses. Disgusting sensations are triggered

primarily through smell or touch, eye or intellect, and in the end reach the nervous system.49

According to Chan Shing Kwuan, in his review of 12mq2, Zhang Huan’s performance was

far from being “shock art,” which produces no meaning and exists only to create a shock.50

44 Huan, Z., Zhang Huan: Altered States: A piece of nothing, New York, Charta and Asia Society, 2007. 45 Qian, Z., Performing Bodies, in “Art Journal”, Volume 58, February 1999, p. 65–66. 46 Pearlman, E., Zhang Huan Altered States, Brooklyn Rail, 2007. 47 Mendelssohn, M., Philosophical Writings, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 137–38. 48 Menninghaus, W., Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, SUNY Press, 1999. 49 Ibid. 50 Kwan Chan, S., Public Displays of Affliction: On Zhang Huan’s 12m2, In “Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art”, Volume 17, January 2018, p. 97–107.

25

Quite the opposite, Zhang Huan was able to unleash personal, social, and political distress,

which also functioned as symbolic critiques by executing abject art performances.51

According to Kwang, abjection is a sad state of mind, a primal sense of detestation and

aversion.52 In this regard, 12m2 can be considered an abject art performance, as the artist

underwent immense physical and psychological distress purely for the sake of his work.53

12m2 was the first performance of Zhang Huan expressing to the audience the concept of

disgust in a direct way, due to the strong engagement between the little audience of artists

and the physical sensations unleashed.

1.7 The link between ‘art for art’s sake’ and performance

In a project statement for his performance, Zhang Huan connects the 12m2 performance to a

strict relationship between inhabitants and their environment in China, as he could see from

his everyday life in the East Village. Here, almost all the public facilities were abandoned,

and the conditions of the performance were those that all artists and habitants could

experience every day. The toilets that could be found in backyards, in the most densely

populated areas of the new-born metropolis, were deeply in contrast with the Beijing modern

development. The performance could also be represented as an act to raise people’s

awareness of the neglected subset of the population in China, including the artist himself,

who was in a vulnerable position relative to the nation’s rapid growth, and who was yet to

benefit from economic development and was still living in a substandard environment.54

Zhang Huan art is not made to shock, or at least, shock is only a consequence of his art. His

main goal is to unleash the personal and social distress he has to undergone during his life.

This symbolism also leads to an indirect critique of abject art performance. Art performance

at Beijing East Village followed the growing attention of experimental artists who swapped

“art for art’s sake” for a new type of embodied experience. As other fellow artists already

did, Zhang Huan followed the trend of the “art for art’s sake” movement, which was

becoming increasingly popular even in Eastern art. This concept was not new: it took

inspiration by Kant and Nietzsche philosophy for whom, once clarified the essential role of

51 Kwan Chan, S., Public Displays of Affliction: On Zhang Huan’s 12m2, In “Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art”, Volume 17, January 2018, p. 97–107. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Huan, Z., Zhang Huan: Altered States: A piece of nothing, New York, Charta and Asia Society, 2007.

26

art in each human life, the suggestion is that art can justify itself and depends on the quality

of dispensing with a purpose. Only through aesthetic production, the world could be justified.

Art should maintain his appearance as a tool for stimulating life and this, according to

experimental artists, could lead to recognizing an aesthetic point of view, for which it is

essential not to look and focus only on the purpose of art because art is the purpose of life

itself.

Zhang Huan’s conception performance also differed from that of performance artists from

the 80s. His predecessors often saw themselves as preachers, on a "martyr’s path" to educate

the masses55. As Gao Minglu explained: “In these daily activities we find the nearest thing to

what humanity is, the essential human thing - the question of the human spirit, the quest to

discover how we relate to the environment we exist in.”56

1.8 Self-torture and the experiment of 65 Kilos (1994)

In Zhang Huan’s experimental work, the artist must always stick to the mission of creating

something unique as a universally valid experience. Since those first performance pieces, he

continued to use his body as an extreme medium of communication. Zhang’s body has

always been in the first raw to express art. Right after 12m2, in 1994, just one week after,

Zhang Huan realized 65 Kilos in his atelier. The piece was named after his current body

weight. During the process, Zhang Huan was tied with ten iron chains hung three meters

above the ground to suspend himself for more than one hour. He was facing the ground,

while a selected assistant who was also a nurse took 250 millimetres of blood from his body.

This was dripping slowly into a large white hospital pan set on the floor. In the end, the

blood was burnt and cooked with a little electric heater located under the pan, releasing a

strong and unpleasant smell. After a short time, Zhang Huan’s body became desensitized

from hanging, with consequently, extreme pain for the artist. This way of torture allowed the

artist to reach an incredibly high level of concentration and meditation, leading to a greater

understanding of his limits. The concept behind 65 Kilos was to idealize Nirvana, the

ultimate state of ascetic life, which is reached by escaping reality while experience physical

and mental pain. The artist, who exposed himself to several extreme situations related to

masochism and torture, wanted to express the breakdown of the most personal fears and in

55Gao, M., Pilgrimage to Santiago, in “Zhang Huan Official Website”, 2000. 56 Ibid.

27

the same time commenting on the social injustices.57

Image 1.3: Zhang Huan, 65 Kg, 1994, Beijing, Phaidon

In the same days when Zhang gave life to 65 Kilos, Ma Liuming performed his Fen-Ma

Liuming’s Lunch. For this performance, the artist showed himself cooking some fish in front

of a selected audience, but, “instead of eating it, Ma Liuming attached a plastic tube to his

penis, and began sucking and breathing at the other end of the hose.”58 In addition to the

shock that the performance pieces caused, the similar circumstances of the two different

performance pieces and the setting of East Side Village led to severe consequences. The

police arrested Ma Liuming and forced other artists, among them also both Rong Rong and

Zhang Huan, to leave their places and go into hiding for some time.

Moreover, Zhang Huan also had to leave the city for several months and abandon his atelier.

Meanwhile, after an unpredictable attack the day before the 1st of October 1994, Zhang was

hospitalized due to several head injuries, which caused him to leave the Village and retire

for a while. The East Village artists' community emerged again some months later, but its

members settled in various locations around Beijing. However, although this episode was a

turning point of the development of the East Village of Beijing, the artists' community that

populated it until then, never stopped to grow. Since then, numerous artists have improved

and expanded their experimental performances, spreading their fame among the Country.

57 Dziewior, Y., Zhang Huan, Londra, Phaidon, 2009, p. 47. 58 Fritsch, L., Fen Ma + Liuming’s Lunch I, in “Tate Research Center”, 2015.

28

The statement of Zhang’s event was later published in Ai Weiwei’s agenda-setting avant-

garde journal of contemporary art in China, Black Cover Book (1994).59 The book contains

Zhang’s own words referring to his ultimate digression about performance:

The creative inspiration for my work comes from the most ordinary, easily overlooked aspects of life,

for example, we eat, work, rest and shit every day—the banal aspects of quotidian existence that allow

us to observe the most essential aspects of humanity, and the conflicting relationships within our

environment.60

After the previous performance pieces, the artist kept working on similar provocative works.

Another one closely related to suffering and self-induced torture saw Zhang lying on the

floor, where, next to him, there was a working steel machine. At the same time, molten steel

flew next to his naked body and face. Even if this work was represented without any specific

audience, thanks to the photos taken, we can figure out the pain and the artist’s pain. As

Angie Becker wrote in her article Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Zhang Huan “There

is nothing gentle, warm, or elegant in Zhang’s performance pieces, but a feeling that could

be described as full of tension, cruelty, sympathy, or maybe just admiration for his

endurance. It is like the artist achieved a feeling of overcoming something.”61

1.9 To add one meter to an unknown mountain and To raise the water

level in a fishpond: the last performance pieces in China

In 1995, Zhang created and took part in the performance To add one meter to an unknown

mountain. It took place on a hill in the suburbs of Beijing, in the area of the Miao Feng

Mountain (妙峰山). In order to realize this work, Zhang Huan gathered with several fellow

artists from Beijing East Village who were called by him one by one. Although it was like

balanced cooperation between artists, the whole idea and direction were submitted to

Zhang’s opinion. The work was not improvisation, but the group rehearsed according to

some sketches Zhang had previously provided and they all followed his rules, as putting the

heaviest person on the bottom while the smallest person was on the top. The artist also called

a professional surveyor to check the bodies of the performers, which were precisely at the

height of one meter.

59 Baecker, A., Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants Zhang Huan, in “Art Asia Pacific”, 2009. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid.

29

Image 1.4: Zhang Huan, To add one meter to an unknown mountain, Pace Gallery, Beijing, 1995.

The purpose of this work was, according to Zhang’s statement, to express the Chinese way

of saying “there are always higher mountains and more talented people” (shanwai you shan,

renwai you ren 山外有山，人外有人). It was supposed to express the way human beings

could sometimes feel; where effectively one’s efforts are sometimes worthless, vain, and

useless. The artist himself express this concept by saying, at the end of the performance,

“We tried to raise its height, but our effort would forever be vain.”62 As for almost all the

previous performance pieces, the only evidence this works is a photoshoot. The photos show

a deep connection between the air and people, almost recalling traditional tableaux of

Chinese landscapes. Once again, the image highlights the contrast between the countryside

community and the astonishing alienation of people living in the city society.

To conclude the series about the correlation between human beings and nature, still focusing

on a Chinese expression, Zhang Huan realized To raise the water level in a fishpond. For

this work, he decided not to call fellow artists to help him out, but he chose to invite 40

people from the countryside, a group consisting mainly of migrant workers who came from

all over China. The age of the people who took part in the project was random, including

people aged 5 to 60 years. In order to recruit them, Zhang personally went to their tents

62 Huan, Z., Zhang Huan, Londra, Phaidon, 2009, p. 117.

30

where they used to live. The performance was divided into three parts. In the first part, all

the participants were lined in a circle facing the fishpond while looking at the water in

silence. In the second one, they had to raise the level of the pond by entering the deep water,

while in the last part, they had to divide the fish pond into two sections, by creating a sort of

human wall. Zhang also entered the water while carrying a young boy (the son of the pond

owner) on his shoulders. The entire performance was full of symbolism: the fish and the

water in the pond recall the relationship between nature and other things, and also the

relationship between people and their lovers. In traditional Chinese culture, water

symbolizes the feminine side, as: "Virtue loves mountains while wisdom enjoys the water,

virtue is in tranquillity while wisdom remains in motion."63 In Zhang Huan’s work, men are

like mountains, and they do not move, and, moreover, all the participants were men, which,

at some level, expresses the male-female dynamics64. Another interpretation of this artwork

is also in terms of its social significance. Cities are more and more inclined to modernization,

with consequent population growth and shortage of natural resources, and, in the background,

the expression of the problems raised by the second generation and the migrants’ needs. As

for the previous ones, also this performance was recorded with a photoshoot, that was able to

capture the moment in a symbolic process. The result is not about the concerning of the

individuals but of the interpersonal relationship between human beings and nature.

63Gao, M., Pilgrimage to Santiago, in “Zhang Huan Official Website”, 2000. 64 Ibid.

31

Image 1.5: Zhang Huan, To raise the water level in a fishpond, Pace Gallery, Beijing, 1995.

In Zhang Huan’s work, body consciousness is the main character of the performance: it is

the direct expression and link between his inner soul and the world outside it. This strict

relationship is one of the reasons why his art pieces led him to test his endurance in

correlation to physical pain and collapse. His body also works as the instrument through

which Zhang Huan connects with others, as his more public works prove. He is often naked

in his performance pieces and asks others to be naked as well because nudity takes us out of

our cultural shells and places us back into the natural order.65 These ideas are not new to the

artist because his roots are deeply influenced by Asian spiritual practices, especially

Buddhism.

However, body consciousness is increasingly marginalized in a society that tends to frame the

relationship between mind and body using computer-inspired metaphors that make inviolable

distinctions between software and hardware. In this situation, Zhang Huan’s insistence on the corporeal

aspect of knowledge offers a useful corrective.66

To raise the water level in a fishpond was the last performance realized by Zhang Huan

before leaving China. He was capable of addressing the meaningless of human actions

65 Heartney, E., Zhang Huan: Altered States, New York, Charta and Asia Society, 2007. 66 Ibid.

32

concerning the durability and power of nature, succeeding in the scope of produce timeless

images and strong visual impact at the same time.

1.10 New York and the ‘hard to acclimatize’ feeling

In 1998 Zhang Huan moved to New York City, since, few years before, the government

closed the Beijing East Village art collective. This chance was an essential change in the life

of the artist, who needed to reconsider his approach to art. At the same time, while living for

the first time outside China, he was forced to deal with feelings and situations typical of the

alienation of moving abroad as an immigrant. In the USA, he continued to follow up the use

of performances and his body, but he started to implement his works with the inclusion of

situations that expressed his sense of social isolation and vulnerability to external social

circumstances.67

There are several reasons why Zhang decided to move to the United States. They could be

researched in the more significant financial opportunities than China’s still-nascent gallery

scene, following the end of a previous set both by Ai Weiwei, the first one to move to the US

in 1981, and also Gu Wenda 谷文达 (1987), Xu Bing 徐冰 (1990) and Cai Guoqiang 蔡国

强 (1995)68. He gained much fame in New York thanks to the documentation of To raise the

water level in a fishpond, which served as the main picture featured in the “Inside Out: New

Chinese Art” catalogue exhibition at the Asia Society at PS. 1 Contemporary Art Centre. The

images proposed were captivating because they did not need to be read only in a Chinese key,

as their initial purpose, rather, was to be considered as an universal idea of loneliness and

man’s relationship with nature.69 Not only the pictures of the last Chinese performance were

the ones assigned to represent Zhang Huan in New York: also other photographs and videos

appealed to international critics of the time. The reason for this interest is due to the

aesthetics of his black and white prints and the use of colour that recalled the style of

photography of the 70s. One of the most representative and emblematic examples of these

photographs is the Skin series, where the artist faced the camera repeating simple gestures in

the same image composition.

67 Heartney, E., Zhang Huan: Altered States, New York, Charta and Asia Society, 2007. 68 Baecker, A., Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants Zhang Huan, in “Art Asia Pacific”, 2009. 69 Huan, Z., Zhang Huan, Londra, Phaidon, 2009, p. 55.

33

Right before moving to New York, Zhang Huan produced several paintings, from 1996 to

1997, still focused on the body, represented in different forms, some of which were

simplified, symbolic. However, more than paintings, another series of photographs, which

were designed to open the Inside Out: New Chinese Art show, captured the interest of the

American audience. The series was named Foam, and consisted of large and colourful close-

ups of Zhang Huan’s face while dripping soap bubbles. In all of them, he keeps his mouth

open and he holds, right at the center of the scene, a tiny family snapshot: photos of babies,

family groups, siblings, sweethearts. The photographs appear in eleven different versions

with the same characteristics. The images are excessive, they strikingly bring to mind birth, a

mythic life-giving god rising from the sea and some form of torture.70

The associations predicted by the author is unfolded further: we are born with our future

already in us; our personal histories can be swallowed to escape detection, consumed by a

higher power like the state or regurgitated, given away, under pressure. Besides all of this,

while experiencing all of the swallow mentioned before, there is still the dump immediacy of

the big face, the slippery soap bubbles, the little snapshot.71

After showing his work at Ps. 1 Contemporary Art Centre, Zhang’s schedule was quickly

full of performance pieces and works commissioned by top cultural institutions. This success

was due both to the reputation he had built in China in the Beijing years and to the changing

appetite for a cultural establishment that was beginning to look outside its well-known

context for artistic talent72.

The first performance realized in the USA has some different elements compared to all the

previous compositions. Pilgrimage – Wind and Water, staged at P.S.1 in 1998 for the Asia

Society exhibition Inside Out: New Chinese Art, was focused not only on the figure of

Zhang but also on the explicitly Chinese objects incorporated. In Pilgrimage – Wind and

Water, Zhang Huan’s approach was to ask several native American dog owners to come to

see the performance and to keep their pets close to the performance spot. Then, naked, he

started to approach the core of the project: a traditional Ming Dynasty style bed with three

blocks of ice on the top. Zhang Huan, imitating a Tibetan going on pilgrimage, started to

approach the bed. Barely dressed, and prostrating himself while walking, he approached the

70 Smith, R., Art in Review, NewYork Times, February 12, 1999. 71 Ibid. 72 Baecker, A., Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants Zhang Huan, in “Art Asia Pacific”, 2009.

34

bed, then, completely naked, he laid face down on the ice mattress. The purpose was to

express the cultural shock he felt one arrived in the city. In the meanwhile, nine different

pedigree dogs surrounded Zhang Huan. The dog refers to the coexistence of races (and

species) in a multicultural city as New York, but, moreover, they added an uneasy

undercurrent, blurring the line between their status as predators and as pets. During the

whole performance, the dogs were tied to the bed. These animals were the pets of Americans

and were also symbols of warmth and affection, used as symbols of the modern American

bourgeoisie society.73

Image 1.6: Zhan Huan, Pilgrimage Wind and Water, New York, Phaidon.

Zhang Huan first impression of New York was linked to dogs: during the performance, he

probably had initially hoped that they would keep him company, would keep him from

feeling lonely and cold.74 As the artist himself explains:

The dogs in New York are of all variety, as its human inhabitants. They’re totally different from the

dogs I saw in China. In China, dogs eat leftovers. Our relationship with dogs is that a dog is a dog and

he will never become a human being. Perhaps this is characteristic of a developed country. People

become more and more lonely, and the relationship between them becomes more and more distant and

indifferent.75

The high contrast between the performance and the dogs was stark. The people who were

there to watch were expecting that, as Zhang Huan was laying there on the ice, his warm 73Gao, M., Pilgrimage to Santiago, in “Zhang Huan Official Website”, 2000. 74 Ibid. 75 Huan, Z., Zhang Huan, Londra, Phaidon, 2009, p. 120.

35

body would begin to melt the ice. This is what the people were expecting, and also what

Zhang wanted them to believe.

Even if Zhang never spoke directly about the desired consequences of the performance, this

was precisely the commentary about his uncertain expectations about his new home. Instead

of warming the ice, he came closer to freezing, which was the reason why he just stayed in

that position for more or less ten minutes. The results wanted to be a question on how much

an immigrant could have the perception of feeling included in a new environment after

moving from his homeland. Zhang wanted, above all, to express all his discomfort

describing that sensation as: “to feel (the fear and culture shock) with my body, just as I feel

the ice.”76

The performance raised some questions: can an artist melt into a new culture and absorb it as

it was part of him or will he be never wholly absorbed? Can the artist forget the culture he

came from, or maybe will he identify with it even more strongly than he had before?

Apart from the fact that Chinese elements were included for the first time, as already

mentioned before, it is interesting to note how Zhang started to grant some freedom of

expression to other participants, while still planning each detail of the entire process in a

sequence of events. He was attempting to consciously minimize his power as a performer,

and establish a communication with the other participants.

Since the first time he arrived in the West, Zhang always felt a cultural division. Among the

other questions, he was wondering if it was better to keep performing and putting all his

strength in a solo performance, as in 12m2 or 65 Kilos or to make some radical changes. The

reason why Zhang Huan started asking himself all those questions was because he did not

know if the western audience would react in the same way and if his performance would be

effective in a foreign country. In China, since the standard features and especially the

attitudes of the people were quite similar to the artist’s, it was easier to predict the audience’s

reactions. It was easier for Zhang to valorise the relationship between his self-consciousness

and his body and to express it to the public. However, in the USA, and more broadly, in all

76 Baecker, A., Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants Zhang Huan, in “Art Asia Pacific”, 2009.

36

the Western states, the cultural differences between the west and China made his artwork

less relatable to the general.77

After Pilgrimage, Zhang continued, over the next few years, to shift focus from internal

matters of the physical body to external matters like, for example, culture and state.78 He also

continued to integrate Chinese elements, such as the use of Tibetan music, in his most

elaborate action by that time.

As Pilgrimage, the artist’s performance My America (Hard to Acclimatize) reproduced his

discomfort, even humiliation, with the difficulties of settling in the US. This performance,

staged in 1999 and displayed the Seattle Asia Art Museum, suggests a broader message. The

performance was realized in a large hall inside the museum, next to historical findings,

where Zhang placed a U-shaped metal framework. The performance required many elements,

most notably a cast of fifty-six naked Americans of different ages. Once again, as in

Pilgrimage we find the presence of Tibetan Buddhism and Tai Chi-related themes, like for

example the action that the whole cast was required to take: they received some instructions,

for example: “lie face down on the floor and do not move, act and sound like animals and

climb the scaffold”.79 The final action of the performance involved the people running in

circles around the artist, and then climbing the scaffold to throw pieces of bread at the artist

who was sitting in the middle of the stage. The performance was a combination of confusion

and joy as if Zhang Huan were genuinely fascinated by the frantic search for the meaning of

life that characterizes and preoccupies Americans so much, with a mix of spirituality and, at

the same time, violence.

The aim of the sight of this mob turning on the impassive artist was both to feel comic and

unsettling at the same time80, and it dramatized Zhang Huan’s feeling that he could never

fully belong to a world that was so different from his previous one. Meanwhile, the constant

reference to eastern spiritual practices, that were becoming more and more prominent in

American performance art and that preceded this hostile action, pointed to the gap between

the cultural differences between East and West. The performance has both elements of

ambiguity and mysticism, even political and religious references whose interpretation is not

straightforward, but that still manage to straddle the Eastern and Western culture. As Zhang

77 Gao, M., Pilgrimage to Santiago, in “Zhang Huan Official Website”, 2000. 78 Ibid. 79 Heartney, E., Zhang Huan: Altered States, New York, Charta and Asia Society, 2007. 80 Ibid.

37

Huan himself stated: "My understanding is that no one can escape this cruelty, neither

myself nor the audience. Once the audience steps into the site of the performance, they

become involved in the reality before their eyes. They have nowhere to escape, just as they

have no way to escape reality".81

During the American years, Zhang Huan did not only focus on the performance: he

continued to experiment with other art forms. In 2000, he realized his most impressive

“concept photograph” set while shooting the Family Tree series, consisting of sequential

photos taken in Amherst, New York.

Zhang asked different artists to write a succession of Chinese characters on his body,

especially on his face, during a whole day. The final result was his head covered with ink,

not recognizable. The content of the sentences written over him was varied: it could range

from old proverbs to proper names, individual words or sentences. Among others, there was

also the story How Yu gong moved to the mountain, which was used by Mao Zedong to

justify the land appropriation he pursued. In this work, the author still wonders about the

concept of extended identity as described from outside, while offering his personal view of

inclusion. After the work was completed, the face of Zhang Huan was not recognizable, and,

as the artist himself described, nobody could recognize his features, he was a total deep-

black figure, of which was not possible to identify the skin colour. The aim was to show the

photographed person as if he was deprived of his own identity.82

82 Yeon, K.Y., Zhang Huan, Hamburg, Kunstverein, 2003.

38

Image 1.7: Zhang Huan, Family Tree, Pace Gallery, New York, 2000.

On the artist’s forehead, there were written four characters: “Yu gong yishan 愚公移山”

which was an old and well-known Chinese story, whose bottom line is that as long as a

person is determined, there is nothing he cannot achieve. In this series, it is like Zhang tries

to delve into the correlation and arbitrariness, between his natural and constructed self, the

one left behind in China and the current one in America. The two practices present in this

artwork that are at the same time deeply embedded in Chinese culture (here referring to

calligraphy and physiognomy) nullify one another. When calligraphy is applied as a visual

lexicon to the artist’s face, it is, on the opposite, stripped of all his identifiable markers.

As Toby Kamps, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Menil Collection of

Houston said: “Family Tree dramatizes how Zhang Huan's interior life has been stamped by

the stories passed on to him by his family, peers, and homeland. His accomplishment has

39

been to recognize this second skin of conditioning and to slip in and out of it to make art that

is both personal and universal.”83

1.11 My performance series: switching from ‘Local’ to ‘Glocal’ in the

artist’s mind

By 2002, after spending a couple of years making his name famous worldwide thanks to

other performance pieces, Zhang became enough acquainted with the US that he presented

his last Western performance: My New York, which took place on the streets of Manhattan,

realized for the Whitney Biennial. Afterward, this performance could be considered as a post

9/11 memorial tribute. Zhang walked through the streets of the city while wearing only a

bodysuit made of raw meat, shaped to represent Zhang as with the features of a bodybuilder.

The artist handed out white doves to onlookers on the streets who were supposed to release

them as a sign of peace and hope, moreover to let the impression of USA as a superpower, as

it was before. Zhang resembled and interpreted the USA body-building culture, struggling

under the weight of the enormous meat costume, showing a strength display that carried all

the geopolitical and psychological anxieties of the time. The layers of meat built a thick

solidity, and the performance introspects several concepts. First of all, the interpretation of

New York in terms of Zhang Huan’s perception of being a “traveler” and a “tourist” in his

city84. The second is the reference to steroid-infested body-building culture in the US “like

bodybuilders who take drugs and push themselves beyond the limits of their training on a

long term basis until their heart cannot possibly bear such enormous stress.” 85 On that

occasion, five consultants and tailors worked on sewing the meat in order to create a suit.

The total weight of the costume was more than 50 kilograms.

Zhang himself admitted he had had several problems due to the weight of the costume:

“what a body-builder achieves in 10 years, I achieved overnight”.86 During the performance,

one crucial point was the release of the doves. This was not only a figurative representation

83 Kamps, T., Zhang Huan: Family Tree, in “Wichita State Univerisy”, https://www.wichita.edu/museums/ulrich/Art/PermanentCollection/HuanFamily.php 15 Aprile 2019 84 Sharp, V., China’s First-generation Performance Artist: Zhang Huan - Brilliant Ideas, Ep. 18, Bloomberg, 2013. 85 Samnang, K., Khvay Samnang on Zhang Huan, Art and AsiaPacific, no. 105, ArtAsiaPacific, Sept. 2017, p. 31. 86 Huan, Z., Zhang Huan, Londra, Phaidon, 2009, p. 122.

https://www.wichita.edu/museums/ulrich/Art/PermanentCollection/HuanFamily.php

40

of peace, as it could be understood from a Western point of view, but also of the Buddhist

tradition. The gesture to return doves to nature, that Zhang decided to have it done by

immigrants, has the meaning of a benevolent act.

The impact that the USA had on Zhang Huan never really disappeared. In all the years he

spent abroad, he was always concerned about his situation and the difficulties of becoming

acquainted with many aspects of Western culture. Too many of them were too different and

did not correspond to the environment where he grew up. The aesthetic conception was one

of the most important differences that occurred in the lack of harmony and alienation.

As Zhang repeated during the interview with RoseLee Goldberg: “Before I came here (to the

United States), a lot of friends told me that I would get lost in the melting pot of New York.

"It's such a big city," they said. "You're going to be eaten up by it." So I had to find a

strategy to keep my individuality and let it grow out of this idea of the periphery and the

core.”87 The years in the US were also the right time for Zhang to examine his deeper aims.

This was the time he started to develop the My series into a comprehensive series, which also

included My New York and My America. “My means mine, with me at the center, wherever I

went, everything around me was “local”. I interacted with local to create Glocal, this was my

take on “glocal”.”88

With the My series, Zhang Huan tried to overcome the fear of feeling the distance between

his own culture and the ones he has been visited in the past few years. Right before moving

to the United States, Zhang was deeply convinced that many people had the concept and

conviction that everything that was related to China in contemporary art was almost wholly

learned from the West. Because of this, also the perception of the world power has been, for

a long time, similar, as China was seen as an economically weak country compared to the

West. Zhang Huan considered himself as a person coming from a third world country,

coming from the periphery and going to the core. In a similar situation, he tried to change

this dynamic with the My series: treating himself as the core and using the entire surrounding

environment and all countries as the periphery. During almost a decade, wherever he went,

whether it was New York, Boston, Rome, or Australia, he saw the new city as the periphery,

87 Artspace Editors, New York Made Me Sick at Heart: Performance artist Zhang Huan reflects on how America made him more Chinese, in “ArtSpace”, 2017, https://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/book_report/new_york_made_me_sick_at_heart_zhang_huan-55042, 10 July 2019 88 Ibid.



41

while focusing on the power of his creative energy, using the body as a link between

different peripheries. This was for Zhang Huan the best way to feel involved in the culture

he was approaching, while not giving up his own social identity. His works and

performance pieces were presented in several countries and resulted in works such as My

Australia, My Boston, My Japan and so on. As the artist himself declared in an interview for

Bloomberg, “I melted two different cultures, my Chinese culture, knowledge and schools of

thought, with the local culture I was visiting. This was the inspiration for “my” series, that

lasted a decade.”89 In all his performance pieces, there were clear connections between them

and the places in which they were represented: in My Boston, the number of books Zhang

used to cover himself referred both to the incredible educational system of the city and to the

many difficulties encountered by the artist while trying to acquire knowledge from American

sources. In another performance, My Rome, there is the ancient and impressive history of the

city as the most crucial focal point, representing a civilization once incredibly powerful and

now on the edge of collapse. This performance was created in collaboration with the

Capitoline Museum, commissioned together with a photographic series in which Zhang

climbed on different statues (in this case, on the river god statue) and solemnly moved

around it making large shimmering soap bubbles.

In 2005, after around a decade from the production of the My series, Zhang felt the necessity

of changing some aspects of his life. In the USA, he grew up as an artist, but he started to

feel that this was not enough. As an artist and as a Chinese, he felt that he did not have so

many choices in New York. The place, the culture, and the language were no longer having

something in common with him. “I was a traveler; I could call myself a refugee. You could

even call me an American Dream. I came to America to make money and come back to

China eventually. That was my intention all along”.90

89 Artspace Editors, New York Made Me Sick at Heart: Performance artist Zhang Huan reflects on how America made him more Chinese, in “ArtSpace”, 2017, https://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/book_report/new_york_made_me_sick_at_heart_zhang_huan-55042, 10 July 2019 90 Ibid.



42

1.12 The artist’s return to China and the establishment of the Shanghai

atelier

In the same years, specifically the first five years of the new millennium, China political

issues, as the entrance in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and practical aspects

associated with foreign investments, led the country to a phase of incredible development.

Architecture and art both thrived again. As seen by the eyes of the artist, in that historical

moment, the power and strength of the West were now switching to the Eastern countries.

China was no longer a third-world Country but was entering a new phase of prosperity.

For all these reasons, in 2005, Zhang Huan decided to go back to his homeland and to open

an atelier in Shanghai, a city he had never visited before, both far from his hometown in

Henan and to his artist’s nest, Beijing. While moving there, he drastically changed his

artistic production to create new performance pieces. In an interview, he declared: “In my

eight years in America, I could not see any changes, nothing could stimulate me anymore. I

got tired of the city, however, during this time, China was dramatically changing itself, it

was full of energy and promises”.91

The one in Shanghai is the first atelier Zhang Huan ever had. Looking back to the years in

the USA he never had any atelier, since the primary purpose for Zhang Huan was to continue

to work on performance art. The only atelier he was able to contemplate was his mind. 92

The reason behind the choice to have an atelier was to organize his workspace as an

industry-related complex. The atelier was bought in 2008, three years after the artist came

back to his homeland. It is housed in an eight-acre factory hangar in Xinqiao (社区), an

industrial town in the south-western suburbs in Shanghai. The place is run by Zhang Huan

directly, but more than two hundred assistants work there continuously. The original idea

was to use a smaller place and have just a couple of assistants to help him implement his

projects. However, when Zhang tried to settle it down, he realized he needed a larger place,

like the ones where he used to work in the previous years. Already since 2002, in order to

make installations and sculptures, he has been using some factories. Since it was impossible

for Zhang to go there every day, some products made by the factories were sometimes

different from the artist’s sketches or models or requests. Supported by this previous 91 Sharp, V., China’s First-generation Performance Artist: Zhang Huan - Brilliant Ideas, Ep. 18, Bloomberg, 2013.

92 Xiao, X., Beijing, New York, Shanghai: Continuation of Zhang Huan, Shanghai, Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2010.

43

experience, Zhang understood that it was essential for him to supervise the labor from the

beginning. Thanks to that, Zhang Huan became, year by year, a “salaryman,” working side

by side with professional managers, because only having several professional people at the

atelier allowed him to work professionally and with energy.

The division of labor and its specialization is very similar to Andy Warhol’s factory. The

factory project was designed for creating pieces and a meeting point for fellow artists in

different areas, such as filmmaking or music. Apart from the prints and paintings, Warhol

produced also other pieces from everyday life, such as shoes, but he also focused on films,

sculptures and commissioned different works to be branded and sold items with his name. At

the factory, Warhol's workers made silk screens and lithographs under his direction. Warhol

used silk to produce mass-produced images and mass-produced consumer goods. In order to

increase his production, he attracted adult film performers, drag queens, socialites and free-

thinkers, who are known as Warhol Superstars. These "art-workers," who were considered as

his assistants, helped him create his paintings, while also taking part in some of his films,

and created the atmosphere for promoting the Factory’s name and fame.

Even if the use of numerous assistants and the division for producing the artist’s ideas could

seem to resemble Zhang Huan’s project, some aspects concerning their productions are

different.

The concept of creativity is the first substantial difference between the artists: for Warhol,

the fact that his assistants made their creativity and subjectivity recognizable was a vital

point of the whole production, as the final product had to be marked by each different

personality of Warhol’s fellow workers. Another significant difference between the two

artists is the attitude towards the distinction between work and leisure. For Warhol, there was

not a clear difference between them, treating it as “immaterial work,” describing the concept

by which the value of the product is the one made by the “value” of the informational and

cultural character of the final result.93

While in the Factory project there was an evident cult of celebrity, created artificially by

Warhol for his personal sake, in Zhang Huan’s project, the assistants’ work is more a

mechanical execution under the artist’s guidance. On the other hand, a shared point of their

personal interpretation could be their desire to be individual artists who realized his works,

93 Dziewior, Y., Zhang Huan, London, Phaidon, 2009, p. 83.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silkscreen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithograph

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_film

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_queens

44

instead of developing something more like a label, with every detail controlled by the artist,

without the need for him to put it into practice.

In December 2008, the atelier was relocated to another area around the suburbs of Shanghai.

It is an unfinished state-owned location, which was initially designed to produce large scale

industrial boilers. The facility itself is about 15.000sqm large, and made of steel and cement,

a “microcosm of China’s industrial revolution” as Zhang Huan called it.94 After 2008, the

project to expand the original building adding three construction stages was implemented.

The new rooms were used for a variety of new functions such as a model building space, an

architecture designed stage, a library, an art collection space, an outdoor sculpture space, and

an employee entertainment place.

The studio, as already mentioned, is designed as a company: Zhang Huan is helped by art

managers, technology managers, factory directors in the management of the studio gallery.

The atelier was never completed: as it looks now, it has a workshop for wooden door

carvings, a print workshop, an oil painting workshop, an incense and basic ash creative

workshop, an animal skin workshop, a wrapping workshop and rooms for his team, as well

as an administrative office.

The two hundred people working at the studio every day are not only mere employees but

also young artists and writers, fresh graduates from some art schools around the country. In

addition to them, Zhang Huan’s helpers include woodcarvers, copper artisans, people

specialized in processing animal skins and other highly specialized works. Inside the atelier,

it is possible to see a lot of handcrafted goods directly produced inside the hangars. One of

these is the wooden door panel cravings “memory doors.” For these, Zhang Huan uses

images from old magazines, and, with the help of his assistants, enlarges them in the form of

silkscreen on wood. The result is notably different from the original draft. To express the

relationship between him and his assistants, he describes the following situation: Zhang

Huan asked them to make a “sad leg” from a wood workshop. He recommended not to base

their works on previous works or references, but to use their life experience and their

understanding. From the sketchbooks they realize, Zhang Huan selects all the drawings he

prefers as a starting point to produce his future projects. As he says, in the studio he is

willing to use the wisdom of everybody to help and enrich the production. “I can always

94 Huan, Z., Zhang Huan, London, Phaidon, 2009, p. 139.

45

benefit from each person’s experience and thoughts. Whenever he is an artist or a welder, I

will notice his merits.”95 In the studio, it is possible to find not only artworks but also

waterways with black swans, rescued temple structures from the Ming dynasty, and piles of

grey Ming dynasty bricks found in the countryside. Moreover, a sculpture from the cow-

skin-based Hero series isolated in its own vast space; the Q Confucius No 2 sculpture (2011);

Smoking Buddha (2007)96. There are exhibition rooms with ash paintings, depicting Braille

script and oil paintings. The artist himself seems to thrive in two different spheres while

working: his production setup, schedule of visitors and accessibility to the press are more

likely the ones of a businessman. Then, there is the philosopher and creator conception, as he

likes to explain it:

I’ve thought about stopping and dropping everything, but I will still age and die. I can put out all my

ideas and make all this work with enthusiasm while I’m still alive (…) when you’re really involved in

your work, you don’t have time to contemplate other things, such as basic living conditions and the

meaning of life.97

1.13 The use of ash as a new material: the expression of Buddhism in

Zhang Huan’s works

A significant change in Zhang Huan’s project in the last few years is the use of ash as his

primary material. The first time Zhang Huan saw incense burning in Chinese temples, was

back when he was still a child in Henan. In China, incense-ash is a companion to praying

and worshiping. All the different variations of ash presented in Shanghai’s studio have been

collected through the years from all the different temples in Shanghai and the nearby cities

and provinces. Zhang’s connection with Buddhist symbols is not new in his works but has

become more evident since he got back to his motherland. At first, traveling every summer

broadened his horizons. After he went to Tibet and the Silk Road, his vision changed

drastically, coming back to a more subjective and religious concept of Buddhism. As Zhang

Huan puts it “becoming Buddhist was my fate. Today, Buddhism makes me more tolerant,

quiet and peaceful, and helps me gain a deeper understanding of unpredictably and cause-

effect”.98 Here Zhang Huan explicitly refers to law: in Buddhist context law is the equivalent

95 Huan, Z., Zhang Huan, London, Phaidon, 2009, p. 126. 96 Young, M., Layered ash: a visit to Zhang Huan’s studio in Shanghai, in “Art Asia pacific”, 2015. 97 Shyr, L., Art + Auction, USA, The Power Issue, 2007. 98 Huan, Z., Zhang Huan, Londra, Phaidon, 2009, p. 131.

46

of Dharma, which represents the eternal and universal law. Dharma is the totality of moral

and religious law, together with the respect of the duties.

Zhang Huan explained how much intense was it for him the first time as entered his studio:

“The power of incense ash makes me sleepless and sentimental”. 99 The incense ash

workshop treats the ash first, then it divides and selects it. The next step consists of using the

selected ash to make incense-ash paintings, sculptures, and installations. The discovery of

this new material was associated with an impressive artistic inspiration. Moreover, this

discovery allowed Zhang Huan to use the Eastern characteristics and Chinese-style materials

to take back his national identity, thereby establishing his cultural origins and bonds. As he

said himself:

"Upon returning to China, I had a greater appreciation for traditions and religion, this appreciation came

from everyday life experiences. Therefore, I discovered the use of incense-ash, doors and ox hide...and

constantly had new flashes of inspiration. Tradition is a nation’s body and religion is a nation’s spirit.

Body and spirit form the complete existence. China charges forward at full speed now, but cannot

abandon its body and spirit. Returning to one’s own country, I felt more down-to-earth and ingrained

into society.100

The new material brought a multi-faceted and great bodily transcendence and helped to

develop a new creative spirit. From Zhang Huan’s works in the latest years, we can feel the

strengthening of his spiritual beliefs year by year even more. Between the years 1998 and

2005, right in the middle of his performance pieces in America and Europe, Zhang Huan

declared:

I tried my best to let my thoughts exit my body, and forget the plight of one’s body. Once they return

back to the body you feel more intensely towards physical existence. You will be more aware of the

cruel reality, it’s extremely discomforting. This is not purely physical pain, but also mentally

discomforting. This lingering back and forth between mental and physical planes is the thing I want to

experience.101

Thus, Zhang Huan recalls his personal experiences. Zhang’s haunting ash paintings and

sculptures become symptomatic and characteristic of his artist works as much as the

performances in Beijing and New York. "I created a new genre, a new phenomenon (…).

99 Sharp, V., China’s First-generation Performance Artist: Zhang Huan - Brilliant Ideas Ep. 18, Bloomberg, 2013. 100 Xiao, X., Beijing, New York, Shanghai: Continuation of Zhang Huan, Shanghai, Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2010. 101 Ibid.

47

There are so many different ways to use ash; I probably will not lose interest in it for a while.

It moves me the most-it’s able to seep through me. What is left in it are the remnants of so

many souls."102 Zhang Huan is always searching for original sources in mental and physical

realms, in himself and his environment, and his personal experiences and historical

memories. He is always trying his utmost to extend art’s boundaries, making his artistic

spirit and path worthy of high esteem.

102 Shyr, L., Art + Auction, USA, The Power Issue, 2007.

48

BUDDHISM AND ZHANG HUAN’S ARTWORKS

2.1 Buddhism and contemporary China

The religious path that has guided Zhang Huan’s work in the last years, especially since

2004, right before he returned to his homeland, is strictly connected to the development of

his perception of Buddhism. This perception could be associated with the use of new

materials and subject representation but has deeper roots. During the Cultural Revolution,

Buddhism, as well as other religions, was ostracized, and many temples and icons were

damaged and destroyed. Only in Beijing, of the 6,843 registered cultural relics, around 4,922

were damaged or made unusable during the Cultural Revolution. The target was not only

temples, but more than a million objects of different nature were destroyed. Buddhist monks

who were living in the temples were also persecuted, while sacred books were burned and

destroyed. In the new century, Buddhism is facing a new situation: the development of

Buddhist thought and its different reformations can be considered as a combination of

heritage and innovation. Since the end of the Cultural Revolution, right after Mao Zedong

died (1893-1976), the conditions of Buddhist practitioners have improved steadily. The

Chinese Buddhist community is stronger and Buddhism itself is now living a new stage of

growth.

2.2 Zhang Huan’s Buddhism

Concepts expressed Tibetan Buddhism are pretty close to some expressions of Zhang Huan’s

artistic production. In his view, the circular concept of karma has something substantial in

common with the cause-effect process. Karma, and its power to give to every worshipper

precisely what he deserves, both in positive and negative terms, regulates all aspects of life.

According to Zhang Huan, Buddhism helps to survive adversities like a “dragon swimming

against the current.” 1

Since the first years of his childhood, Buddhism has influenced his journey. From the times

when he worshiped Buddha when he was a teenager, until the prayers he made to the dead

relatives during Chinese New Year, worship has always been present in the artist’s life.

1 Dziewior, Y., Zhang Huan, London, Phaidon, 2009, p. 76.

49

Zhang Huan looks at Buddhism not only as a way to feel more tolerant and peaceful but also

as a path to better understand the cause-effect relationship. When he returned to Shanghai

from the united states, he started to focus more on meditation. His Buddhist conversion

happened in 2005 when a prestigious monk from Southern China converted both Zhang

Huan and his wife.2 In Zhang Huan’s understanding, according to the theory of karma, our

present actions somehow determine our future states of being, including our disposition to

act and desire in specific ways. So, if the theory of karma is true, it seems we are faced with

something very close to determinism and fatalism (at least in a localized way) as well as with

an absence of free-will. 3 The basic idea of the theory of karma is this: besides its purely

physical effects, our actions have also moral and psychological effects, which might occur

either in this life or in future ones, and which affect our environment, genetic make-up,

physical characteristics, social status at birth, length of life, etc., as well as our psychological

dispositions and tendencies to act, desire, etc.4 Zhang Huan describes himself as a “jushi

Buddhist,” (居士佛教徒) a term used to indicate those worshippers who dedicate themselves

to the practice of Buddhism without being affiliated or without living the monastic life. A

practice that is well-known and important during the conversion to the Buddhist religion is

to give a proper Buddhist name to the new worshipper. Rituals have a substantial impact on

Buddhist practices, and Zhang Huan commonly described their importance; especially

during his childhood, several times in his statements he linked them to his cultural

background. “Chinese culture and Buddhism have been an important part of my life over the

past few years. My heart has always had some connections to Buddhism (...) When I was

young, I would go to the temples with my family and light incense and pray to Buddha. Even

though at the time I didn’t really understand it, it was already part of my life.”5

Since Zhang Huan approached this new aspect of religion, one of the essential key points

was a stronger appreciation of Chinese tradition and faith. The earlier works and

performance pieces already had some spiritual and meditative belief, but it is with his

spiritual development that Buddha and its different reminiscences started to play an essential

role also in his artistic expression, becoming one of the main subjects. Religion and

2 Dziewior, Y., Zhang Huan, London, Phaidon, 2009, p. 76. 3 Sousa Silvestre, R. Karma Theory, Determinism, Fatalism and Freedom of Will, 2016, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306268382_Karma_Theory_Determinism_Fatalism_and_Freedom_of_Will, accessed 07 Sep 2019 4 Ibid. 5 Guena, E., Zhang Huan, Rebirth, Italia, ProjectB Contemporary Art, 2009.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ricardo_Silvestre3?_sg%5B0%5D=-d0wL5ALa3GkLNTvCll5Rmo3-a8THnf2aa5OLeg0Caph6cL0Dou3ow0mwvx2Apr2-RwOzs4.r05xNIupM81c76iDoIGZ7S3X4M8v12iqsPJ6fG3Gasp_yjrse2Grgzgko3lPilz83FQSln8sfW88Zt2IuRH6jQ&_sg%5B1%5D=m-UngWILT0XJe7ZuP8OGQuKZKIQA2TRCvayWs0JUAbK6Q8UibPjuac6tnv5SCkPXTWS8HqkMm4VjKkoq.t8TDqq6fLpQpkOGzi82QlHYsrRA-D7s7FBBlI0YNJGwW-unaB4tR1-h_AGSNE0N3I2UUnFqqZh2YLu1Z787KZA

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306268382_Karma_Theory_Determinism_Fatalism_and_Freedom_of_Will

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306268382_Karma_Theory_Determinism_Fatalism_and_Freedom_of_Will

50

meditation have become a significant source of inspiration for the artist, as well as faith and

the human condition in general.

This appreciation comes from my daily life. So I discovered incense ash, doors, cow skin...new

inspirations are continuously flashing to mind. Tradition is the body of a people; faith is the soul of a

people. Body and soul together create a complete existence. China is currently putting all its strength

into developing and moving forward, but it can’t leave behind its body and soul. Returning to my own

mother tongue and culture, I felt that my feet were more stable, that I was deeply rooted.6

Apart from the already mentioned importance of his childhood experience concerning Zhang

Huan’s approach to the Buddhist religion, there is another factor that should be considered:

since the last years Zhang Huan and his family spent in New York, they had been traveling

to different countries. Especially Tibet and the Silk Road countries changed his perception of

his spiritual and religious approach to life.

I believe I was a Tibetan in my previous life and I believe I will be a Tibetan in my next life. I’ve visited

most countries in the world but I’m deeply attracted by the culture and life of that miraculous land. The

history of the Tibetan people and Tibetan Buddhism lies in the geography, nature and climate of that

area. When you stand on the side of a mountain, thousands of metres high, and you face the clouds, you

feel a supernatural force. This scares you so you need another force to overcome this, that is Tibetan

Buddhism.7

2.3 The importance of Tibet

Tibet itself plays a significant role in the development of the religious consciousness of

Zhang Huan: the artist and his family have been visiting the autonomous province several

times since 2005. From the capital city of Lhasa to the sacred lakes, Zhang admitted that

Tibet had a unique influence on his art of the last decade. According to Zhang, the

development of the Tibetan culture itself is already a source for understanding its

population’s attitude towards spiritual life. Zhang declared many times that he was

fascinated by the Tibetan sky burial (tianzang 天葬): this traditional burial is a practice in

which a human corpse is exposed to be eaten by vultures. In Tibetan tradition, it is believed

that this procedure represents the wish of the deceased to go to heaven after forty-nine days

spent between the two worlds. Sky burial started to spread in Tibet as the most common

burial practice in conjunction with the development of Tibetan Buddhism, even if, today, it

6 Guena, E., Zhang Huan, Rebirth, Italia, ProjectB Contemporary Art, 2009. 7 Zhang, H., Zhang Huan talks Tibet at Pace Gallery, Phaidon, 2014.

51

is not the only burial procedure. As a Han Chinese, Zhang Huan was supposed to have little

chance to see one of these rituals during his stay in Tibet. Nevertheless, he managed not only

to observe it closely but also to become the apprentice of a celestial burial master. The

opportunity he had was described by the author Qiu Mi as a “theory of fatalism Zhang has

often emphasized.”8

When it comes to describing the power and the influence that Lhasa generated in Zhang

Huan’s mind, it is necessary to explain the impact that pilgrimages have on the layout of

Tibet. The majority of people who everyday gather on the streets of the capital are pilgrims

coming from all over Tibet. As required by the Buddhist tradition, they usually hold prayer

wheels (Mani wheels) in their hands and turn them clockwise while repeating and muttering

mantras. Pilgrimage is also closely related to life and death: as already mentioned, the

concept of life is closely related to death, which is why in order to gain rebirth (which is not

automatic) a worshipping Buddhist is supposed to spend two years in pilgrimage to reach the

Potala Palace. Another essential tool used in Tibetan Buddhism that attracted Zhang is the

use of prayers wheels. Prayer wheels must be turned clockwise, to keep prayers in the inside,

if worshippers put them on a paper sheet, or they could be carved on the surface of the wheel.

These words are printed inside the prayer wheel. As such, turning the wheel all the way substitutes

reading the words aloud numerous times. In this way Tibetan pilgrims think they can prolong their lives,

and approach samsara early. On my way to Na Mu Cuo Lake, I found a small house built of stone and

clay. I was curious so I stepped inside the house, and was surprised to discover a huge prayer wheel,

powered by water, that turns endlessly. Such cleverness and wisdom.9

For what concerns the inspiration Zhang Huan could have received from the time spent in

Tibet, not only he was inspired by the different ways to represent Buddha, and the

opportunity to come so close to this ancient culture, but he also had the chance to collect

various materials and handcrafted relics. A significant quantity of these artefacts turned out

to be a source of inspiration for his future artworks. One example that will be better

analyzed later is the “three legends Buddha,” which has been realized from the funding of a

stub gold-plated Buddha torso statue on the streets in Bakor, next to the Potala Palace in

Lhasa. In the Tibetan tradition, the torso of Buddha is represented with “three heads and six

arms” or “a thousand-arms,” or after “Joy Buddha.” During the Cultural Revolution, the first

8 Qiu, M., Zhang Huan: after Nirvana a new life begins, n.d., http://www.zhanghuan.com/uploadfiles/Zhang%20Huan%20After%20Nirvana%20a%20New%20Life%20Begins.pdf, 20 April 2019 9 Holmes, P., Zhang Huan: Buddha, UK, Haunch of Venison, 2008.

http://www.zhanghuan.com/uploadfiles/Zhang%20Huan%20After%20Nirvana%20a%20New%20Life%20Begins.pdf


52

stub that gave the inspiration to the “three-legged Buddha” was initially stolen from a

monastery and since then has been passed around.10

During all Zhang Huan’s trips to Tibet, China, and South-east Asia, he continuously

collected broken-up, dismembered materials, part of ancient Buddha statues or relics which

have been destroyed in the years of the Cultural Revolution, especially in bronze and copper;

fingers were torn off; crushed hands, feet, and legs. These elements, especially fingers, have

a considerable symbolism since the position of fingers into various mudras is associated with

different meanings. Zhang often decided to take them back to his studio in Shanghai. This

led to their contemplation and their use as a primary source of inspiration for the artistic

development of his re-interpretation of Buddhist art. He turned most of these objects into

sculptures, which were an entirely different way from his earlier performance pieces.

All the various fragments he found during his numerous trips suggested him the idea to use

them for a series of works, in copper and on a gigantic scale. Copper is an element that

fascinated Zhang Huan, especially for what concerns the place in the Buddha’s bodies in

which all the found coppers were supposed to be attached. Every piece of copper was

initially supposed to be filled with rolled cloth scriptures and prayers, the view of all these

body ruins moved Zhang Huan, who, regarding them, declared: "When I was in Tibet, it

moved me a lot to see the arms and legs at the markets. The sculptures were destroyed

during the Cultural Revolution. By making them larger, it somehow takes away the pain."11

The artist’s return to China marked a point of no return, which separates Zhang Huan’s past

productions from his future works. He stopped to perform “not to repeat himself,” as he

considered to have already reached the maximum results with performance art. Both the

provocative attitude and the shocking performance pieces were abandoned, while the artist

focused all his efforts to express the sense of peace inside his mind that he attained after

coming closer to the spiritualism of Tibetan Buddhism and the creation of material objects.

The sculpture was the most used art form to express it and the sense of serenity these new

expressions gave to him.12

10 Holmes, P., Zhang Huan: Buddha, UK, Haunch of Venison, 2008. 11 Chu, M., Zhang Huan: Altered States, New York, Charta and Asia Society, 2007. 12 Duncan, A., Zhang Huan Artist Overview and Analysis. In “TheArtStory.org”, 2019. https://www.theartstory.org/artist-zhang-huan-artworks.htm, 20 April 2019

https://www.theartstory.org/artist-zhang-huan-artworks.htm

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Image 2.1: Zhang Huan, Long ear Buddha, Zhang Hua Studio, Shanghai, 2007.

Among the most evident examples of the different approach to art that Zhang Huan adopted

right after coming back to China, due to the influence of his travels, is the Long Ear Ash

Head realized in 2007. The idea of the sculpture was to create a considerable representation

of a Buddha's head, with some distinct features as the excessively long earlobes, which reach

the ground. The upper part of the head was slightly lifted from the bottom one, the features

on the head are inspired both by Buddha's features and the artist's ones, concerning the facial

part. The choice to represent himself as a part of the sculpture is associated with a return to

self-portraiture that Zhang Huan was experimenting with, but with the main difference that

for the first time he did not use tools such as performance and photography, and with this

work he reinstates this position in his art practice. On the surface of the sculpture, there is a

laughing Buddha and two similar figures, respectively on the nose and the scalp of the

central Buddha. This work was first presented as part of Zhang Huan: Altered States: the

first major solo exhibition of a living artist held at the Asia Society in New York until today.

By mixing his own features with the Buddha’s ones, Zhang Huan aims to present a sort of

new self-portrait, in order to indicate the tranquillity and peace of mind he has found in these

later years.

As he explained: "I really want my inner state to be more Buddhist, and by transforming

myself physically, externally, with the long earlobes, somehow I can get closer to

54

enlightenment and to becoming Buddha. Also, I opened up my head and revealed the brain

to symbolize that I want to somehow absorb all the qualities of life." 13

He also notes that "I feel I am so lucky to change from a mad man to a man with good food

and a family man, to have my children. I feel that Buddhism has blessed me."14 When asked

why the Buddha is missing a mouth, he responded, "Somehow if you stop breathing, you

transcend life and death. You're in an eternal state."15

In the same year as the Long Ear Ash Head, Zhang Huan created a sculpture at the

London ’s Royal Academy of the Arts. The work, a colossal copper behemoth Buddha torso,

was called Three-legged Buddha, referring to its extra leg stepping out onto a human head.16

The artist commented his work by comparing it to an inner monster using these words: “I

think of the Three-Legged Buddha as somewhat like a monster from outer space; and the

half-head as like a soul flying out of hell. The work demonstrates the confrontation between

these two kinds of powers, and the relationship between the dominant and the dominated.” 17

In the Three-legged Buddha, the leg of the statue is not attached to any upper body, rather, it

begins below the knee and extends towards a foot which is adorned with an anklet, that

could remind the way those are often adorned in Tibet. On one foot the head of Zhang Huan

himself is represented like an appendage. The Buddha sculpture has not the characteristic

feature of a holy statue: it has three giant legs, where, together with a back-bending image of

the Buddha is balanced on thin stilts. The third leg and the foot are in a resting pose, while

on the top the head (of an eight-foot-high) has closed eyes. The top of the sculpture is rough,

with a thoughtful appearance. The artist has combined various body parts, such as legs, arms,

hands, and heads, in order to personify Buddhist deities. It has undeniable strength and

muscularity, especially in the legs.

13 Duncan, A., Zhang Huan Artist Overview and Analysis. In “TheArtStory.org”, 2019. https://www.theartstory.org/artist-zhang-huan-artworks.htm, 20 April 2019 14 Ibid. 15 Holmes, P., Zhang Huan: Buddha, UK, Haunch of Venison, 2008. 16Ibid. 17 Ibid.


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Image: 2.2: Zhang Huan, Three-legged Buddha, Phaidon, London, 2007.

Talking about the influences that led to the creation of the Three-legged Buddha, Zhang

Huan described the sensation of mysterious power at the moment he saw all the fragments

that composed the core of the sculpture. “They are embedded with historical and religious

traces, just like the limbs of a being.” 18 The copper was modified according to Zhang

instructions, to preserve the original characteristics of copper and maintain all welding traces,

while creating the new statues. Three-legged Buddha is not only one of his first works with

the holy figure as the main subject, but is also one of the first realised inside Zhang Huan’s

new “factory” studio, with the help of his assistants, after drawing some sketches and asking

to them to create a first model, before it was actually processed.19

My inspiration comes from daily life, from the most average things, small things that would not grab

anyone attention. Things like eating, sleeping, working and taking a shit every day. Through these

insipid activities that go completely unnoticed by people, we can discover and appreciate intrinsic

qualities of human nature. In doing my work I try my best to experience life, the reality of the body and

I hate the performative, artificial aspects of work. 20

In the same interview, Zhang Huan explains the way he found raw materials and real

inspirations for his latest projects. After he collected a considerable amount of Buddhist

pieces during his frequent trips to Tibet, he started his research also in Shanghai, when he

18 Huan, Z., Zhang Huan, London, Phaidon, 2009, p. 132. 19 Ibid, p.135. 20 Guena, E., Zhang Huan, Rebirth, Italy, ProjectB Contemporary Art, 2009.

56

moved there. All second-hand stores in Shanghai, according to the artist, often offer possible

inspiration and materials from traditional culture. “What I use are mostly abandoned things,

such as door panels and incense ash. In ancient times incense ash would be scattered into

oceans and lakes or being buried underground, but today is treated like trash and thrown

away. Those are unpretentious, close to origin materials”.21 In traditional Buddhism, there

are, as in Zhang Huan’s tradition, several kinds of materials. These materials come in many

different forms, such as bronze, wood, clay and, above all, copper, the one that inspired the

Three-legged Buddha of 2007. Copper, especially during his first period in Shanghai, was

one of the most important materials used by the artist.

Usually these Buddha sculptures are gold-plated or coloured. Most Buddha figures in India and Tibet

are made of copper, that is to say, made by a coppersmith then, usually, gold-plated. But for me, I like to

keep the original quality of copper and the traces of welding, and also try to endow it with a language of

painting on its surface. The copper seems to me to possess the rawness of sealed skin, after it has been

opened up and exposed.22

The manufacturing process is extremely important as well. Among the examples we found

the Berlin Buddha statue, realized explicitly for Haunch of Venison’s exhibition space in

Berlin, consisting of a Buddha made from compacted dry ash, which is sitting opposite the

aluminium mould from which it was cast. As Zhang Huan did for the Three-legged Buddha,

this project was realized based on an original first sketch, that, once again, emphasizes the

different way to produce art that Zhang Huan adopted since his return to Mainland China.

After realizing a first draft, printed and enlarged to cast for aluminium, the main structure

was made by aluminium, which was also designed for being used as a model for an incense

and ash work. The hollow Buddha is twelve feet high and nine-and-a-half feet wide and is

large enough to accommodate a dozen people. For packing all the eight tons of ash into

every crevice of the Buddha’s body, arms, fingers, head, and face, the help of several

assistants was required.23 The aim of producing it with the combination of the two materials

was to see the interaction between the aluminium support and incense. Incense could react in

different ways, enlarging or collapsing, creating a feeling of time passing inexorably.

Symbolically, the incense ash invokes the desecration of centuries-old artefacts under Mao

21 Guena, E., Zhang Huan, Rebirth, Italy, ProjectB Contemporary Art, 2009. 22 Chu, M., Zhang Huan: Altered States, New York, Charta and Asia Society, 2007. 23 Winston K., The Buddhist Resistance of Zhang Huan’s Pagoda, The Art Journal, 2018.

57

Zedong era. Metaphysically, the ash represents a conceptual reduction of being nothingness,

which, according to Melissa Chu, corresponds to the artist’s religious beliefs.

The incense work will change according to the environment and time. It will interact with the air and

vibrate, thus becoming bigger or smaller. The work changes, and its final stage is beyond our prediction

or control. (…) The work presents a collective memory, soul, thoughts, prayers and collapse. It means a

collective invalidation. What I want to express in Berlin Buddha is that life is about living, aging, illness

and death, and it is a cycle of birth and rebirth. 24

The material, therefore, used in connection with the conception of the cycle of birth, death

and the circular passing of time, are insertions of the Buddhism doctrine and credence which

are essential for the artist’s projects. Another example of the connection between materials

and the artist’s personal experience could be the presentation of Henan Bull of 2007 and

Giant No. 2, realized one year later. For the process of realization of both of them, Zhang

Huan used ox hide, a familiar material, which could be associated with his childhood in

Henan, where the rural life is a constant inspiration for him because he already used those

materials in the past. 25

Like ash, oxhide is also used because it is difficult to predict the final result. For Giant No. 2,

Zhang Huan asked an expert who was currently working for his studio how ox hide should

be treated. The final result was the giant’s face with two parts brought together, without

being cut or trimmed, leaving the whole process absolutely “untouched.” The Giant No. 2

idea that Zhang Huan had in mind was to make the giant with the appearance of a creature

more similar to humans than to a creature out of space. 26 After the realization of the piece,

Zhang Huan described his “giant” as a representation of Bodhisattva Kishitigarbha Vow

Sutra. The aim to present it as a giant is not casual: Zhang Huan refers, once again, to

Buddhism. A giant is a symbolic figure that could represent a human being who is looking

for more in-depth knowledge and elevate himself. In the sutra, the Bodhisattva Kishitigarbha

vows to attain the final enlightenment after the hell realm is emptied. The giant presented by

Zhang Huan is a compromise between an enlightened giant and a human being, staying in

24 Huan, Z., Zhang Huan, London, Phaidon, 2009, p. 132. 25 Ibid, p.135. 26 Ibid.

58

the middle and not coming from the sky as a supernatural being, able to react to the pressure

of the world or face reality. 27

2.4 The use of materials: the importance of incense ash

There is another material, used to realize the majority of the projects, that must be taken in

consideration when explaining the relation between Zhang Huan and the influence of

Buddhism in his art.

The most iconic material we are introducing was already discussed and presented in this

thesis, and is an essential example of the development of Zhang Huan works: the material

under analysis is incense ash, whose use became prominent since the artist returned to

Shanghai. The first approach Zhang Huan had to ash, not considering the memories and the

events linked to his childhood, was in the Longhua temple (龙华寺), in Shanghai.

I decided to visit Shanghai’s popular Longhua Temple, Yufou Temple, and Jingan Temple, as well as

those in my local neighborhood, in order to collect the ashes and bring them to my studio. To some, ash

seems useless and insubstantial; it is a short-lived witness to human spirituality and spiritual practice. To

me, it carries unseen sedimentary residue, and tremendous human data about the collective and

individual subconscious. 28

When he visited the ancient temple in Shanghai, Zhang Huan was already closer to Buddhist

spiritualism, even if he had not yet converted, but the intense spirituality of the temple

moved his thoughts. While remembering his first approach to ash, the artist explained his

feelings when he decided to use this new material:

There I noticed many lay Buddhists who spent hours alone with the sculpture of Buddha, muttering

prayers;[…] I was deeply moved by the power of the sculpture and the allure of such power, attracting

people to burn incense and to pray. The temple floor was covered with ash which leaked from the giant

incense burner. […] These ash remains speak to the fulfilment of millions of hopes, dreams and

blessings. It was here that I finally discovered the ingredient I had been looking for to pave the way for

new work. 29

27 Huan, Z., Zhang Huan, London, Phaidon, 2009, p. 136. 28 Huan, Z., Zhang Huan: Ash, UK, Haunch of Venison, 2007. 29 Ibid.

59

The gesture of burning incense ash to pray is a common practice in Buddhist temples around

China, especially for what concerns the Han ethnic group: it is both for honouring the

ancestors and to pray for the worshipper of idols and Buddha. Burning incense is an old

technique: according to the artist himself, who analysed the material and its history in detail,

ash probably emerged in China in the Eastern Zhou era (770-256 BC). Eventually, the

incense was firstly used during rituals, or burned in honour of heavenly spirits.

Some of the earliest use of incense in China was associated with the first importations

through the Silk Road, Sri Lanka and Java.30 It was made of natural products, such as dried

grass or seeds. During the period after the Sui (581-619) and Tang (619-907) dynasties, the

cheaper araucaria for producing the ash variety replaced those from Turkestan, imported

from the Silk Road. Meanwhile, Buddhism was elevated to state religion, being declared, for

the first time, more significant than Confucianism and Taoism. This also played a significant

role in determining how incense was traded and handled, becoming an arbitrary object in the

Buddhist practice and, from its burning in temples, it derives an active role of Chinese

spirituality. This life view is closely related to the worship of ancestors and all the rituals,

beliefs, and behaviours to interact and respect their ancestors. Incense ash became a valid

medium of religious aspects in daily-life rituals. When it is burned, believers get closer to

ancestors and spirits, quell their fears and engender desires. The communion, which is

created while burning the incense during prayer, is fundamental for how individuals relate to

deities and spirits. In other words, human communication with otherworldly beings was

channelled through practice. Even in today’s Chinese daily life, all the blessings, prayers,

fortune telling, ways of dealing with bad omens and funeral rites are complete only with the

practice of burning of incense.31 The materials selected by Zhang Huan in the latter period of

his artistic production display a deep spiritual connection and, at the same time, a strong

connection with physical and everyday needs. Incense ash is, according to Zhang, the

material that combines these two different aspects.

The idea of the regeneration of trash material is fundamental for the use of ash: burned

incense is the symbol of rebirth, of the cycle between life and death, of the impermanence of

the human condition. This concept is not excluded from a comparison with the changing

nature of China. This example of creation from the waste of some other materials also

30 Huan, Z., Zhang Huan: Ash, UK, Haunch of Venison, 2007. 31 Ibid.

60

expresses and aims to represent the quick changing of China: since the creation from waste

or discarded material echoes the changing nature of China, since it reminds the way the

country is becoming a superpower while is losing the reappraisals of things lost in this

transition process.32 Incense ash has a deep meaning for Zhang Huan: it is hugely symbolic

since it represents the hopes of the worshippers while being also the expression of the

prayers and faith. Ash sculptures are a collective blessing, the memory, and soul of Chinese

people. 33 Ash is collected from different temples around Shanghai with the help of his

assistants. At the same time, Zhang also specified that:

As an artist and as individuals we select materials as message carriers to reconnect with the spiritual

world outside of our everyday life. Incense burning touches and awakens the spiritual impulse

embedded deeply in our subconscious. Therefore, the ashes produced already a great deal of potential

for connecting the human with the spiritual.34

Even if incense became a fundamental material in 2007, it is possible to find it in Zhang

Huan’s works also a few years earlier. Its first appearance was in 2001, the period in which

the artist’s performance pieces were already switching to spiritual. During a visit to Santiago

de Compostela, Zhang Huan was invited to create a work for the “Museum of

Peregrinations”, in which he saw for the first time the incense used inside Catholic Churches.

This first approach to its spirituality led to the realization of the performance Pilgrimage to

Santiago, of the same year. Since then, the attraction Zhang felt toward this material never

disappeared.

While these socioeconomic circumstances were indeed favourable to Zhang Huan’s new

artistic direction there is a transition from performative art to a more object-based practice. It

proceeded according to an accurate logic internal to his work: “After years of doing

performances, I had figured out the layers and meanings in my work. I hoped to execute

these conclusions in new experiments with various art mediums.”35 As a classically trained

painter, Zhang had always been a powerful and compelling image-maker, particularly as a

32 Huan, Z., Zhang Huan: Ash, UK, Haunch of Venison, 2007. 33 Zhang Huan used 20 tons of incense ash to create 5m statue, in “Public Delivery”, 2017. 34 Gaskin, S., Zhang Huan in Conversation, in “Ocula”, 2015. https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/zhang-huan/, 24 Aprile 2019 35 Miall, N., Zhang Huan: Ash, UK, Haunch of Venison, 2007.

about:blank

https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/zhang-huan/

61

performance artist. Due to this, it was easier for him to use canvas as an extension of his

body instead of performance.36

The first experiments he did with ash were more similar to paintings, while the ash collected

came from more than twenty different temples around Shanghai. The first step in the

production of these canvases is ash separation. Ash could be divided in several different

shades, used by the artist as the basis for the painting. At first, when Zhang Huan started to

use this new material, the figure he represented were more abstract subjects, and sometimes

the ash used still contained some parts of the joss stick in it. Most of the canvases represent

photographs, produced similarly to the Foam series, emphasizing a link between current

moments and the individual ancestors of everybody, which are conditioned by society.37

These early experiments clearly show that Zhang Huan was trying to use a new tool, making

a virtue out of its material qualities, understanding how to use it in the most suitable way.

Dry incense ash is compacted into one-meter cubes whose striated form, caused by layering

ash of varying tones, recalls centuries of geological stratification.38

Due to his artistic background, so closely related to performance, it is easy to understand

why Zhan Huan always felt a particular predilection for ash: incense ash is a material easy to

disintegrate, that is why it could reflect the defiance of object hood-tallied with the

immateriality of performance. 39

When Zhang firstly approached this material, he was not an expert. He was used to applying

a layer of ash powder to canvases with prepared adhesive grounds, and then build up the

upper texture with larger flakes and joss stick leftovers. Due to this approach, Zhang Huan’s

first ash paintings are thickly-impasted abstract works but, since 2007, his approach has been

refined. He used to paint directly on the canvas, but, since he could work in cooperation with

his assistants, Zhang decided to use a technique according to which the canvas was placed on

the floor, and ash was used by scattering incense of different colours directly on it.

In the first series of ash paintings and portraits, the subjects he decided to represent were not

related to spirituality, but they were a description of social status or age. The subjects

36 Miall, N., Zhang Huan: Ash, UK, Haunch of Venison, 2007. 37 Storr, R., Zhang Huan, London, Phaidon, 2009, p. 57. 38 Miall, N., Zhang Huan: Ash, UK, Haunch of Venison, 2007. 39 Ibid.

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included the rural population of China (like in the Seeds series), soldiers, generals, or

undescribed people with the age temporal referents as the only feature.

When describing the influences Zhang had on the creation of these paintings, the first

reference is to Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer.40 However, even if there was an initial

inspiration, and similarities as well, like the use of raw materials and leftovers (Kiefer) or the

photorealistic effect (Richer), Zhang’s sensitivity can be described as a clear representation

of China’s most recent history.

As Richer and Kiefer did in Germany, Zhang Huan decided to switch and started to

experiment with a new form for his paintings, coming closer to an expression of “Capitalist

Realism” in his ash paintings. 41 Those paintings, whose most peculiar example is Canal

Building (2007/2008), describe China’s recent modernization in a realistic way and with no

gimmicks. Canal Building is a cemented block (5’ 11" x 59’ 1" x 19’ 8") with the semblance

of sculpture more than a painting, tall enough to make trying to see the upper side of it quite

a challenge. A scaffolding walkway was installed, to have a clear view of all its sides, which

could be reached by stairs on both sides. Seen from the walkway, the painting represents a

landscape of a digging a canal under construction.

The reference of Canal Building is to the agricultural and industrial reforms implemented by

Mao Zedong between 1958 and 1960.42 The painting aims to represent the purity and

strength of Chinese businesses’ start-up times.43 Here, ash is used as a tool to exasperate the

memory of past ages in China, when the development was only imaginable in the future, but

the work also looks at the future.

40 Storr, R., Zhang Huan, London, Phaidon, 2009, p. 98. 41 Ibid. 42 Huan, Z., Great Leap Forward, in “LV Foundation”, 2007. 43 Liu, J., Zhang Huan: Dawn of Time, Shanghai, Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2010.

63

Image 2.3: Zhang Huan, Canal Building, Shanghai, Phaidon, 2008.

The painting was conceived as horizontal rather vertical. This choice is not only made

concerning painting techniques, for which one of Zhang Huan’s assistants put the ash at the

right points while standing on a mobile platform, but also for his secondary meaning of

rising from the floor as the Chinese society did during the latest decades44. There is not a

“solo” hero in this ash painting, but there is the collective effort to build the canal involving

each person on the scene, the real protagonist of the canvas.

Ash is a connection with different societies and times, in which the difference between the

layers, a more indistinct one in the background and a more differentiated one in the

foreground, is noticeable. The incense ash collected for this work has three different nuances:

light, dark grey and black; the choice of not using more colours is because reality must

remain unpredictable and entirely understandable by the viewer. Even if there is no apparent

connection of Canal Building with a more spiritual use of ash, this material is still the critical

point of the entire project. Ash remains close to the definition of “vulnerable, impermanent”

and always refers to Zhang Huan’s hope and aim to represent death as an unsafe condition of

human life, expressing the mortification and vanish of it.45

44 Storr, R., Zhang Huan, London, Phaidon, 2009, p. 102. 45 Liu, J., Zhang Huan: Dawn of Time, Shanghai, Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2010.

64

While Canal Building could seem more a political and historical retrospective, the use of ash

is still closely related to the spiritual attitude of the material, as, once again, the artist

declared:

When I see people going to the temple and praying, they have all their life’s wishes and prayers going

along with this particular material-burned incense offerings. I really wanted to combine it and use it as

the foundation of this particular piece. It’s the collective spirit and collective thinking, and collective

wishes of the people in China.46

Image 2.4: Zhang Huan, Canal Building, Shanghai, Phaidon, 2008.

The image of the canal construction is taken from a photo of 1942 or 1943 in the fourth issue

of China Pictorial of 1972, the ash painting is way more surreal and realized in a non-

realistic manner, focusing more on the meaning of the picture than on its reproduction, in

contrast with other canvases Zhang Huan realized in the same years. "I tried to combine a

minimalist style and maximized image into a new artistic language."47 This combination is

46 Huan, Z., Statements, New York, PaceWildenstein, 2008. 47 Liu, J., Zhang Huan: Dawn of Time, Shanghai, Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2010.

65

the effort of doing a transcendent analysis of history in correlation with its spiritual meaning,

an embodiment of the spirit, to create a more concise and precise overview of history.48

On the other side, when it comes to producing large scale objects and sculptures, ash

processing changes inevitably: ash must be mixed with glue in order to create a more stable,

yet easy to disintegrate substance. After creating a compact substance, the result of the

glued ash must be compacted into a mold for several days inside the aluminium case that

protects it. In some cases, like in the Berlin Buddha, the aluminium case is placed right in

front of the incense ash version, to resemble the original status of the works, whenever it

would not be possible to recognize the ash after all the changes due to trampling down of the

structure.

Zhang Huan’s sculptural works are often based on his appearance, that is, a series of small-

and medium-sized sculptural busts are modelled almost exclusively on the artist’s own head,

but with their personal expressions and individual textures, they communicate the rich

variety of human experience.49

Image 2.5: Zhang Huan, Berlin Buddha, Zhang Huan Studio, Shanghai, 2007.

Most of the statues represent giants. As already discussed, giants are the representation of the

figure in between the human appearance (composed by the face lineaments of the artist

48 Huan, Z., Statements, New York, PaceWildenstain, 2008. 49 Ibid.

66

himself) and the willingness to reach the illumination. Another example of this

representation could be expressed by the Smoking Buddha, from a 2007 installation. This

Buddha is gentle, but it does not represent the classical image of Buddha. His figure is

“cloaked in a post-apocalyptic mantle, a blighted, volcanic crust from which joss sticks and

other bits of unidentifiable debris protrude.” 50

The air and the space that surrounds the Buddha is pumped with incense sticks, as a

connection with its lively spiritual energy. Zhang Huan, while explaining the process that led

to the creation of these unconventional Buddha figures declared: “After the brainstorm, my

mind reaches a state of calm in which I am sublime, hallucinatory, awed, expressionless and

non-gendered. Ash seems to carry my soul away.”51

Ash is still one of the most peculiar materials Zhang Huan is using in his current works. It

represents a way to express and reconcile his idea of spirituality and drive this effort of

explanation inside artworks, demonstrating a willingness to mix its symbolic importance

with a personal emotive output.

Incense ash has been described as a useless and insubstantial material, but, at the same time,

associated with high aesthetic appeal closely related to spirituality. Zhang described it as

“carrying unseen sedimentary residue, and tremendous human data about the collective and

individual subconscious.”52 And added, “The task, for me, is to solidify these remains of the

spiritual life, and allow this evidence somehow to haunt my pictorial depictions of historical

events, people or earthly symbols.”53

2.5 Work analysis: Pagoda

In the last decade, Zhang Huan production paid great attention to various forms of art and, in

particular, to the understanding of the human condition correlated with the latest history and

cultural happening. One of the most important and tragic events that occurred in China since

Zhang Huan’s return to China was the vast and destructive Wenchuan (汶川) earthquake,

which, on the 12th of May 2008, destroyed a large area in the Sichuan province, reaching 8.0

on the Richter scale. According to the official information source of the People’s Republic of

50 Huan, Z., Statements, New York, PaceWildenstain, 2008. 51 Sharp, V., China’s First-generation Performance Artist: Zhang Huan - Brilliant Ideas, Ep. 18, Bloomberg, 2013. 52 Miall, N., Zhang Huan: Ash, UK, Haunch of Venison, 2007. 53 Huan, Z., Zhang Huan: Ash, UK, Haunch of Venison, 2007.

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China, the total amount of losses was 87,150 dead and 17,923 missing people.54 After this

tremendous natural disaster both the media and the government focused not only on its

natural range but on all the social and political implication it had, involving human rights,

safety, corruption linked to the reconstruction plans and outrage for the death of many

people. All of this led the artist to develop two projects realized between 2008 and 2009. The

first one is Pagoda (2009), in which there is an active Buddhist influence in the entire

commemorative structure, starting from the chosen name. First of all, it was inspired by the

Bawbawgyi Pagoda from the seventh-century in the Burmese kingdom of Sri Ksetra, in

Myanmar. As a memory building, its first use is to commemorate all the losses following the

terrible earthquake, but, taking a closer look, Pagoda shows an unexpected element in its

composition: in one fissure of the structure it is possible to see a head of an embalmed pig

carved into the bricks. This unconventional detail is a real testament of an actual event

occurred after the earthquake: a pig, which belonged to a farmer who lost his wife during the

tragedy, survived under the ruins for 49 days, before being rescued by the rescuers.

Image 2.6: The Bawbawgyi Pagoda in Myanmar.

The pig survived thanks to rainwater and rotten wood inside the structure where he was

stuck. Due to this great feat of resilience and survival, the Chinese media dubbed this pig

54 Winston, K., The Buddhist Resistance of Zhang Huan’s Pagoda, in “The Art Journal Open”, 2018.

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Zhu Gangqiang, meaning also Pig Steel-strength, so, as a result, the public opinion

welcomed it as a symbol of resilience in the face of disaster.

In Buddhism, any soul needs to spend forty-nine days in a purgatory state before being able

to reach illumination and salvation. This element was fundamental for Zhang Huan, who saw

assonance between the seven weeks of purgatory and death and rebirth in Chinese

Buddhism.55 That said, it is now clear how the juxtaposition between an animal and a sacred

building is not casual or blasphemous. The Pagoda structure itself has different elements

inside it: even if the Pagoda was inspired by the model of Bawbawgyi, some architectural

elements are different. The bricks that make up the original structure are brown, while the

ones used for Zhang Huan’s Pagoda are grey. The difference in colour is because the bricks

used for the work were taken from the ruins of old buildings found around the city of

Shanghai, a kind of pre-modern neighbourhoods, a relentless demolition relic holdover. This

is a not so casual choice since it represents the ability of relics and leftovers to have an

ambivalent capacity to be disgusting and reassuring at the same time, due to their nature,

even if this status of disgust is often associated with human relicts, not with animals.56

Image 2.7: Zhang Huan, Pagoda, London, 2008.

In the survival of Zhu Gangqiang and its correlation with the forty-nine days spent in the

Buddhist purgatory, it is also possible to see the inner development and spiritual rebirth of

the artist, who went through a long process that lasted all his life to reach the Buddhist and

55 Winston, K., The Buddhist Resistance of Zhang Huan’s Pagoda, in “The Art Journal Open”, 2018. 56 Ibid.

69

religious awareness he gained so far. Also, the choice to represent a pagoda is not only due

to the formal fidelity of the Chinese styled ones, but, instead, is more a reference to the

capability of the monument to transfer spiritual authority from region by region.57

2.6 Work analysis: Zhu Gangqiang

Right after Pagoda, in 2009, Zhang Huan offered a more specific retrospective about Zhu

Gangqiang, held at White Cube Mason’s Yard (September–October of 2009). Even if the

reference to the Sichuan earthquake was less direct than in the “Pagoda” Exhibition, it is still

present. During a whole month, Zhu Gangqiang was registered in a live view session from

Shanghai, while in the London’s location a rare Oxford Sandy and Black breed was left

roaming. During the Zhang Huan: Zhu Gangqiang installation, there was, along with the

presence of animals, a selection of Zhang Huan’s incense ash paintings.

All the exhibitions at the White Cube focused on the terrible events that happened during the

2008 earthquake, using the figure of the pigs and Zhu Gangqiang as symbols for describing

it. Among the ash canvas, it was possible to find the representation of the train that caught

fire inside a tunnel during the earthquake, or even of the figure of Zhang sitting in the train

wreck, making the artist a witness of the event.

For the exhibition of Zhu Gangqiang, Zhang Huan decided to buy that very pig from the

former owner, whom he paid with a new home for him and for the surviving members of his

family. The process of anthropomorphization of Zhu Gangqiang increased considerably,

primarily when Zhang Huan started to take into consideration the idea of adopting the pig,

which set off a debate of whether the animal was a ward of the farmer, of the local

community, or of the state, since its figure was now considered important by everybody

around all China, both from the Government who could use the animal for its propaganda

and also by the local community, who saw in Zhu Gangqiang a personal payback. Due to its

elevation in status, shortly after Zhu Gangqiang was quickly turned from an earthquake

survivor into an art world superstar.58 The fact that the pig survived for forty-nine days

meant something for Zhang: its survival was hailed as a miracle by the Chinese public, and

57 Winston, K., The Buddhist Resistance of Zhang Huan’s Pagoda, in “The Art Journal Open”, 2018. 58 Ibid.

70

Zhang was sufficiently moved to consider this event as an insight into the ultimate nature of

reality, which, according to Buddhism, can lead to a path of salvation.59

Zhu Gangqiang, before becoming a relic, became human. This consideration of giving

human life and animal one the same importance became more and more evident in Zhang’s

work after the Wenchuan’s earthquake tragedy, while the international focus was pointed on

the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics more than on the disaster.60 Since the public attention

was more focused on the Olympics games, the animal quickly became a national symbol of

hope while recalling the tragedy occurred.

Image 2.8: Zhang Huan, Zhu Gangqiang, London, 2009.

Zhu Gangqiang died shortly after the White Cube exhibition. This did not mean the end of

the exhibition that Zhang Huan developed with a particular focus on it as the main character.

Two of the next projects were Dawn of Time at the Shanghai Art Museum, on February of

59 Barlett Voon, P., Zhang Huan: Zhu Gangqiang, in “Yishu”, January - February 2010, pp. 74-79. 60 Winston, K., The Buddhist Resistance of Zhang Huan’s Pagoda, in “The Art Journal Open”, 2018.

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2010, and 49 Days, presented at Blum and Poe Gallery, in Los Angeles, during May and

July of 2011, in which the heart of Pagoda and its display were the protagonists of the two

major exhibitions.

During 49 Days, Pagoda was exhibited alongside a set of eleven sculptures made from

similar grey bricks. In 49 Days, Zhang Huan used 200-year-old reclaimed bricks, which

were reworked by the artist into symbolic images, which, in turn, form massive,

disintegrating, mosaic-like sculptures. These sculptures consisted of six pigs (whose names

were simply numbers: 49 Days #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #11) and, together with them, five skulls

(49 Days names: #6, #7, #8, #9 #10) that corresponded to the numerology that constitutes the

purgatory in medieval China (that goes from the fourth to tenth century).61

At the same time, the representation of Pagoda during the exhibition of 49 Days still reflects

and emphasizes the Buddhist consideration of both death and rebirth. Ten of the sculptures

also represent the Ten Kings of the Chinese Buddhist tradition. They were the guardians who

presided the courts of purgatory for seven weeks, the time spent by the souls over there.62

The other sculptures represented other essential figures from the same historical period (IV -

X century AD): the Bodhisattva Ksitigharba, a fundamental iconography of the Ten Kings at

the height of their cult during the ninth and tenth centuries. Ksitigharba, that indicates the

figure of the human saviour, has the full power of decision upon the forgiveness outcomes

and decided upon rebirths.63 This is the reason why in 49 Days the brick sculptures are

eleven and not only ten. Zhang Huan decided to show together with the Ten Kings and the

saviour Ksitigharba from medieval China. This choice provides an expanded context for

interpreting Pagoda that is more spiritual than political.64

Once again, it is possible to see and understand the value Zhang Huan gave to Zhu

Gangqinag, while putting its figure and representations next to the sacred one of the

Bodhisattva. Furthermore, it also recalls the Indian Buddhist respect for all forms of life with

a Chinese Marxist understanding of struggle, and stands in distinction to other examples of

contemporary Chinese art that take explicit aim at the official failures of the Wenchuan

earthquake.65

61 Winston, K., The Buddhist Resistance of Zhang Huan’s Pagoda, in “The Art Journal Open”, 2018. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid.

72

Moreover, the fact that Pagoda was made by destroyed buildings bricks and could be built

and dismantled for each exhibition could be seen as an attempt to describing the Buddhism

impermanence between life and rebirth.

In contemporary Chinese art, the body is often an active site of resistance to the idea of the

self that should instead privilege the community. Working with the body, within a Chinese

context, has its genealogical ancestors in ancient religious rituals, theatrical performance,

calligraphy, and is also connected with the body language of Mao-era Socialist Realism.66

Critics often have seen it as a process of constructing and reconstructing the identity of the

excessively rapid social change and modernization, as well as reflecting the harsh

environment and the onset of globalization.67

Zhang Huan continues to develop new working methods, having grown up as a mature artist

embracing a more philosophical and Buddhist sensitivity and aspects of everyday life.

Describing the choice to use Zhu Gangqiang as the protagonist of such a crucial

remembrance of the dramatic event in correlation with the Buddhist conception of it, Zhang

Huan declared to see several similitudes about the mental status of Zhu Gangqiang in the

days right after the earthquakes, when he needed to survive, and the one the artist himself

experimented at the moment right after his first performance, Angel, in 1993. Both of these

experiences resulted in strong hope in life, passing through a hostile and extreme

environment, which stimulates the inner soul and the auto-transcendence process.68

2.7 Work analysis: the Poppy flowers series

Since his return to China, when Zhang Huan turned his art into a more concrete concept, he

collaborated with and was represented by the Pace Gallery, a leading contemporary art

gallery which represents many significant international artists and estates of the 20th and 21st

centuries. The Pace Gallery has a long history that began when it was founded by Arne

Glimcher in Boston in 1960: it is now directed by Marc Glimcher. Pace, over the decades,

has presented many works by renowned artists to the public for the first time, with more than

700 exhibitions, including scholarly exhibitions, and has published more than 400 exhibition

catalogues. 69 Pace Gallery has several branches all over the world, including London,

66 Barlett Voon, P., Zhang Huan: Zhu Gangqiang, in “Yishu”, January - February 2010, pp. 74-79. 67 Ibid. 68 Artoni, M., Zhang Huan, in “Flash Art”, 2015. 69 Huan, Z., Spring Poppy Fields, PACE press release, 2014.

73

Beijing and New York. It is precisely in the London venue that Zhang Huan held, from the

25th of April 2014 until the end of May of the same year, Spring Poppy Fields, his first

exhibition at this gallery, at the Burlington Gardens.

Image 2.9: Zhang Huan, Poppy, Pace Gallery, Shanghai, 2010.

After experimenting with different art forms, including performance art, photography and

ash painting, Zhang Huan returned to his first approach to art: oil paintings. The Spring

Poppy Fields exposition features fourteen, vividly coloured, oil on linen paintings made

between 2011 and 2014. These paintings remind/are inspired by Buddhist iconography,

especially the traditional masks. The series took inspiration from Zhang Huan's travels to

Tibet, with several references also to Nepal, Bhutan, and India. The canvases feature

hundreds of colourful, textured, miniature faces that are represented with a technique similar

to pointillism. The way Zhang Huan uses colourful painting creates an optical illusion. Seen

from a distance, the canvases appear as a field of psychedelic colours; the pink, teal, lilac,

and cornflower blue palette are the most eye-catching ones, able to convey the mystic energy.

However, coming closer, the colours split up and is possible to decode the facial figures of

little skulls which lose their abstraction. Because the position of the skulls seems random and

haphazard, the placement on the canvas appears misleading.70

Due to the presence of little smiley skulls, which is a reference to the Tibetan Buddhist

iconography, the colours suggest a sense of hallucination. This depiction is meant to

illustrate the addictive sentiments of cravings inescapably experienced by all human beings.

70 Wang, S., Pace London presents “Spring Poppy Fields” featuring new works by Zhang Huan, in “Cafa art Info”, 2014.

74

Taking a closer look at the painting, as mentioned before, from a distance, the symbols at

first appear like poppy flowers, but, coming closer, they instantaneously turning into toothy

smiling faces, of multiple dimensions. The skulls have various sizes, some bigger and some

smaller, but they are all smiling, as if they were laughing at the futile human attempt of

avoiding mortality.71 In some cases, the skulls are more delineated with clear fine lines,

while in others the artist tries to blend and dissolve them with the use of thicker impasto

applied outlines.

Skull symbolism has a long history in Buddhism: one of the first representations of a skull,

taking inspiration from Hindu religion, is that of Nataraja, one of the incarnations of Shiva.

He is depicted wearing a necklace made of skulls and dancing the cosmic dance of creation.

In this case, the skulls are the representation of the link between time and the death of all

beings, seen as a natural process and as the progression of life due to the fact that everything

moves circularly.

The skulls are also present at the top of a club or a drum as part of the libation vessel for

Tantric ceremonies, or in the form of garlands, necklaces, or crowns. In Tibetan culture,

skulls are talismans against human beings’ helpless attachment to the self and their

experienced sufferings, mainly because for a Buddhist, death itself promises no more

suffering than endless cycles of rebirth and reincarnation do.72

Image 2.10: Tibetan Buddhism classical paintings, Sotheby’s.

Similarly, in Buddhism, especially in Tibetan Buddhism, skulls are not symbols of death or

loss, but enclose the concept of emptiness. Emptiness in Buddhism is described as positive

71 Wang, S., Pace London presents “Spring Poppy Fields” featuring new works by Zhang Huan, in “Cafa art Info”, 2014. 72 Chiu-ti, J., Skull Obsession: Religion and Opium in Zhang Huan’s Poppy Fields, in “Sotheby’s”, 2013.

75

because it represents one of the qualities of the universe.73 As in Hinduism, the skulls are

usually used as ornamental figurative elements in necklaces, and in Tibetan Buddhism they

are called “Munda Malas,” whose purpose is to symbolize the rejection of phenomenal

appearances. In Buddhist iconography, these skulls are usually worn by “fierce deities”. This

is the name used to call the fierce, wrathful or forceful of enlightened Buddha, Bodhisattvas

or Devas, various divine beings.

Image 2.11: Nataraja statue, skull detail, Lotus sculpture.

Skulls are also used in Tibetan Buddhism as a solo standing figure, appearing with four

canine teeth, in order to express the symbol of biting through of the four maras (which can

be translated as “obstructions”). 74 The skulls’ role is to protect from obstacles in the

practitioner’s path toward the Buddhas and the Dharma, to act as guardians against demons

and to gather together sentient beings so that they may listen to the teachings of the

Buddhas.75

In Poppy Flower Spring, the skulls are recognizable only when the viewer comes closer to

the painting since the pointillist technique is used to transform the poppy flowers in

adamantine grins of the Lords of the Funeral Pyre (called Chitipati). All the skulls (Chitipati)

represent skeleton dancers, a typical iconography throughout the Tibetan cham practice and

73 Caron, M., The Symbolism Of Skulls In Hinduism & Buddhism, in “Sivana East”. https://blog.sivanaspirit.com/skulls-hinduism-buddhism/, 4 May 2019. 74 Ibid. 75 Linrothe, R., Ruthless Compassion, Berkley, Shambhala, 1999.

https://blog.sivanaspirit.com/skulls-hinduism-buddhism/

76

other various representation of folk dance. The choice to use skeletons also refers to other

aspects of Tibetan Buddhism, particularly the practices of “sky burial” and chöd, where

skeletons and skulls are prominent figures. 76

The Tibetan Buddhist references are not just limited to the presence of the skulls in the

painting: Zhang Huan was inspired by Tibet also for the colours used for Poppy Flowers

Spring. In the Tibetan iconography, the colours used are mainly red, green, blue, yellow and

white. They are quite different from the ones used by Zhang Huan, but, in the way they are

presented (often giving rise to an explosion of ecstatic hues), they are incredibly similar to

Zhang Huan’s approach. This is because the artist used dazzling pigments for the

composition of his work, which gives the skulls a vibrant vitality and a deep contrast of

colours. The skulls are abstract, but references are clearly visible. The faces, even if

sometimes could be difficult to distinguish due to their small size, are always smiling,

conjured up by thick, impenetrable layers of paint.77 On the other side, the various colours,

representative of “garish consumerism”, enhance the sinister and dark-humoured

characteristics of the skull. The tones of the colours, according to some interpretations,

remind of the maniacal faces taunt at the darker effects of opium, while also recalling the

Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat’s opium-infused inane smile.78

The vast use of skulls by Zhang Huan is also recalling his first performance approach,

including the inspiration given by the human body.

Zhang Huan took inspiration from the hallucinatory effects of opium, derived by poppy

flowers, and combined it with the impermanence of Tibetan skulls motif. The skulls reflect

the Tibetan Buddhism cycle of life, which is divided into the infinite cycle of birth and death,

until the reaching of Nirvana as the final step of the journey.79

The skulls are exclusively in typical Tibetan style. In this culture, the monks (now called lamas) used the

mystical image of the skulls to protect the population from the worldly pleasures. Usually, also the

representation of skulls in tattoo art is a reminder for keeping away the vices and passion. Zhang Huan uses this

figure to keep in mind the impermanence of everything and the part that death assumes in daily life.80

Zhang Huan often introduced Buddhist icons as well as death rituals in his art, and this

choice is also adopted specially for its Tibetan meaning: all feelings and behaviours, such as 76 Pearlman, E., Zhang Huan’s Painterly Buddhism, in “Hyperallergic”, 2013. 77 Chiu-ti, J., Skull Obsession: Religion and Opium in Zhang Huan’s Poppy Fields, in “Sotheby’s”, 2013. 78 Huan, Z., Spring Poppy Fields: Exhibition of new works by Zhang Huan opens at Pace London, in “ArtDaily.org”, 2014. 79 Ibid.. 80 Huan, Z., Rhino Trail, in “Tuskr”, https://www.tuskrhinotrail.com/artists/zhang-huan/, 4 May 2019.

https://www.tuskrhinotrail.com/artists/zhang-huan/

77

anger, ignorance, and lust are destructive for the soul. In this context, the skulls have a

protective and salvation effect on human beings, helping them to destruct the ego, preventing

the worldly pleasure, in order to complete the path for reaching the Nirvana.

Another element of the Spring Poppy Fields series is the featuring with some animal ribs

laying over the skulls. According to Zhang Huan, the meaning of the ribs is to create a

composition between the elements, referring to the themes of injuries, war and widespread

violence and disasters.81

As in other works of the artist, the central theme is the impermanence and the transient

nature of life.82 Despite it, for what concerns Spring Poppy Fields, according to Chiu-Ti

Jansen, it is possible to imagine a correlation between the artwork and the historical Chinese

context. One of the reasons is offered by a speech by Dalai Lama in “My Land and My

People,” which was written down during a meeting with Mao Zedong in 1995: during the

discussion, Mao said “But you need to learn this: religion is poison, poison. Like a poison, it

weakens the race. Like a drug, it retards the mind of people and society: the opium of the

people. Tibet has been poisoned by religion and your people are poisoned and inferior.”

Alluding to Karl Marx’s maxim that religion is the opium of the people.83

When it comes to contextualizing his works in correlation with politics and ideology, Zhang

Huan usually rejects all the assertions for which his art hides a political meaning. Zhang

Huan’s Poppy Fields is something more than a reference to a specific historical context.

Cushioned in Tibetan Buddhist symbolism, the Poppy Fields series represents resistance to

an overly politicized interpretation of anything that has to do with Tibet.84 The author aims

to invite to explore a deeper layer of the universal human condition as unfolding through

these skulls.

When asked to talk about Poppy Fields and its meaning, Zhang Huan, explained: "The

poppy field also expresses the loneliness, worries and unhappiness of humanity. As a matter

of fact, it is consistent with my earliest art performances just that the form and method are

different,85 therefore it is the same. That is the link.” So again:

81 Huan, Z., Spring Poppy Fields: Exhibition of new works by Zhang Huan opens at Pace London, in “ArtDaily.org”, 2014 82 Huan, Z., Rhino Trail, in “Tuskr”, https://www.tuskrhinotrail.com/artists/zhang-huan/, 4 May 2019. 83Chiu-ti, J., Skull Obsession: Religion and Opium in Zhang Huan’s Poppy Fields, in “Sotheby’s”, 2013. 84 Ibid. 85 Huan, Z., Zhang Huan talks Tibet at Pace Gallery, In “Phaidon”, 2014.


78

The poppy field series describes the attempts by people to pursue freedom and happy life in the present

life. But it’s an illusory condition. It is a kind of happiness over terrorism, anxiety and loneliness. It can

also be interpreted as a reappearance of the spirit of those who have already died in the poppy field.86

2.8 Work analysis: Semele

Being a polihedric artist, in 2009 Zhang Huan was summoned by The KT Wong Foundation

to design, represent and stage the opera “Semele.” This is a musical drama, initially

presented "after the manner of an oratorio," in three parts by George Frideric Handel (23

February 1685 - 14 April 1759) in 1744. The opera plot is based on a pre-existent opera

libretto by William Congreve (24 January 1670 – 19 January 1729), while both of them were

inspired by the story from Ovid's Metamorphoses of Semele, mother of Bacchus. In the

original pamphlet, the plot revolves around the adulterous love between Jupiter, the most

important among the gods, and Semele, a mortal princess. Jupiter conducts Semele to a

secret hiding place on a mountain to be his mistress. When Jupiter's wife, Juno, learns of her

husband's adultery she is enraged, and plots against Semele. At the same time, Juno appeals

to Semele’s ambition and to her love for Jupiter, convincing her to insist on seeing the lover

in his original divine form. Even if Jupiter finally agrees, Semele got consumed and burned

by his thunderbolts. From her ashes, though, her unborn child, Bacchus, arise and later

becomes, according to mythology, the god of wine and ecstasy. Semele was represented for

the first time in 2009, with a co-production between the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie de

Munt, in Belgium, and the KT Wong Foundation.

The story of Semele is rich in symbols and represents the contrast between the concept of

love and the fall that follows when something goes wrong. The history is a classic tale about

love and the human relationship between the betrothed and betrayed, but also about divine

dalliance and mortal downfall. Even though Zhang Huan is a poliedric artist, he had never

approached the Western opera before, since, for him, any opera “is found in the attention it

pays to the human desires.” Showing both the dynamism of contemporary art with the 18 th-

century baroque opera, Zhang Huan’s Semele wanted to explore the universal themes of love,

ambition, but, more than everything else, betrayal and redemption.87

Cause and effect, desire, humanity’s bestial nature, are all core concerns in Semele. During

the representation, Zhang Huan has created and fashioned giant, neon-coloured balloon 86 Huan, Z., Zhang Huan talks Tibet at Pace Gallery, In “Phaidon”, 2014. 87 Akel, J., For Zhang Huang, Love’s Battlefield Is a Ming Dynasty Temple, in “Tmagazine”, 2015.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Frideric_Handel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libretto

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Congreve

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semele

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacchus

79

figures to loom above the action. The aim of these figures is that “like the gas within them,

our desires and greed will constantly expand,” Zhang says. “But in the end they, and we, will

deflate and become dust.”88

At the center of the opera, there is a reconstructed Ming dynasty temple in which all the

opera events were held. The temple was purchased by Zhang Huan from a rural Chinese

family, in a little village between the Anhui and Zhejiang provinces. The shrine was

transformed by lighting into an altar, then including a palace, a crematory, and finally

heaven.

The 17-ton temple was painstakingly reconstructed piece by piece inside the studio in

Shanghai, and on stage it manifests Semele's physical and dramatic core. When transporting

the structure to Zhang’s studio after the artist purchased it, his assistants found a diary

belonging to its former tenants. The content of the diary develops around events that

concerned the whole family: a jailed husband details the discovery of his wife extramarital

affair and the way he, subsequently, confronted his competitor with deadly consequences.

“When I read this diary, I thought to myself, here is real-life material. In the pastoral tale of

woe, I found a corollary to the mythical tale of Semele’s amatory demise.”89

88 Milzof, R., Temple of Doom: Zhang Huan Produces George Frideric Handel’s Semele, In “Departures”, 2015. 89 Akel, J., For Zhang Huang, Love’s Battlefield Is a Ming Dynasty Temple, in “Tmagazine”, 2015.

80

Image 2.12: Semele opera scenography realized with the Ming Dynasty temple, Artnews, 2009.

In the diary, the main focus is always the love and hate relationship between the wife and

the groom, and his sense of responsibility and impotence toward his family. Since the opera

initially took place in Ancient Rome, Zhang Huan decided to switch the location to

compromise between “East that meets West.”90

The ancestral temple was located in the town of Du’ze in Quzhou City (衢州), on the border

of the Zhejiang (浙江) and Anhui (安徽) provinces,” Zhang Huan said:

By taking an ancestral family temple with over 450 years of history and rebuilding it on the stage of a

Western opera house, my goal is to allow the opera singers to react this classical Western opera on an

Eastern stage latent with the tragic emotions of Semele, while at the same time allowing Western guests

who enter the opera house to experience the dramatic beauty and pain common to all human beings.91

The facility serves first as the intended location for Semele’s and prince Athamas’s wedding.

Later, its columns are turned into a little forest, while the temple is changed into a heavenly

bower where Semele decides to live with her new lover, Jupiter. 92 Zhang’s Semele is

something between two historical references. Semele opens with a video, which explains the

temple’s origin and how it was disassembled and transported to his factory-sized Shanghai

90 Greenberger, A., Gods and Monsters: Zhang Huan on ‘Semele,’ His Cross-Cultural Opera, in “Artnews”, 2015. 91 Ibid. 92 Sobel, J., Opera Review (NYC): Handel’s ‘Semele’ Directed by Zhang Huan at BAM, in “Blogcritics” 2015.

81

studio. While representing it, the whole cast starts singing the Communist “The

Internationale.” This hymn was used both as the national anthem of the Chinese Soviet

Republic and during the student protests of 1989 in Tiananmen Square. Both the prologue

and the final scene with this song were actually censored once the opera was represented in

China, but, at the same time, an anatomically correct donkey in one scene remained intact.

For Zhang, the historical narrative in this production, despite the Chinese setting, speaks to a

broader public:

My opera is a narrative as Chinese as it is Greek, as contemporary as it is classical, and this unique stage

will make it as much a reality as it is a myth, as much a story of humans as one of the gods,” he said,

while continuing “Cause and effect, desire, humanity’s bestial nature-these are all core concerns in

Semele.93

In Semele, as in the other works analysed in this dissertation, there is a strong Buddhist

component. Zhang’s production is faithful to Handel’s one, but yet Zhang Huan modified the

staging: traditional Chinese and Buddhist elements were incorporated throughout it. In one

scene, a white dragon is represented between the temple’s columns, while in another, a

Tibetan performer walks down the theatre aisle, singing a traditional folk song. “Deeply

influenced by Tibetan Buddhism, I care about mankind’s life and death, as well as its

spirituality,” Zhang said. “Some props play as metaphors, telling us that the human desire

and greed will continue to expand, but, in the end, will return to dust.”94

Zhang Huan includes the emotion and the exoticism of Buddhism with a keening solo chorus

sung by Tibetan singer Amchok Gompo Dhondup, whose aim is to tie together the cultural

elements of Ancient Greece and Tibetan Buddhism. Zhang Huan wanted to demonstrate the

universality of the human voice in whatever musical tradition it is employed.

Moreover, dust is the most important symbol of Buddhism Zhang Huan decided to leave in

the opera: during the final scene of the opera, another video was projected on a screen

behind the temple rear entrance, as in the first scene, showing an oversized portrait of

Semele made of incense ash. Ash and dust have a symbolic meaning and refer to universal

concepts. In it, the audience observes Zhang’s ash painting, a portrait of the adulterous

93 Greenberger, A., Gods and Monsters: Zhang Huan on ‘Semele,’ His Cross-Cultural Opera, in “Artnews”, 2015. 94 Ibid.

82

Chinese wife, slowly disintegrating into a blank canvas.95 In the end, a woman appears

weeping in the interior part of the temple. “The desire infuses our life,” Zhang concludes,

“but also ultimately leads to our demise.”96 At the end of the opera, Semele sweeps the floor

of the stage,” Zhang said:

“This means cleaning the dust of our minds. You can feel the dust of the old house; you can catch a

whiff of the centuries-old smell on it. You unmistakably get a sense of the lives and tragedies

experienced by generations that have lived there. It transports you to another world, where you may

commune with innumerable souls of the past.”97

Image 2.13: “Semele” final ash portrait painting, Telegraph, 2009.

Zhang Huan believes that the story of Semele will repeat over and over again. “In the never-

ending suffering caused by desire, mankind is doomed to ceaselessly regress in an endless

cycle, until we return to the beginning,” Zhang said. “This is drama, this is life.”98

Semele is the only opera Zhang Huan decided to take part in. When asked why he chose to

experiment with this new art form, he answered: “I always like to do things that I don’t

understand, things that I’ve never done before.” As he began to think about it, some

connections were established: Handel’s tale of a mortal girl taken up into heaven and

95Akel, S., For Zhang Huang, Love’s Battlefield Is a Ming Dynasty Temple, in “Tmagazine”, 2015. 96 Ibid. 97 Greenberger, A., Gods and Monsters: Zhang Huan on ‘Semele,’ His Cross-Cultural Opera, in “Artnews”, 2015.

98 Ibid.

83

transformed after sexual intercourse into a divinity has many equivalents in the Chinese

myth and also relates to Buddhist ideas about reincarnation and karma.99

99 Christiansen, R., Zhang Huan: from baroque to Beijing, in “Telegraph”, 2009.

84

CONCLUSION

Today, the long path that lead the development of Zhang Huan’s approach to art is closer to

traditional forms of art compared to the beginning. The artistic changes that he has been

trough are among the most complete in the contemporary Chinese art scene, and Zhang

Huan’s willingness to pursue his unstoppable development is not over yet. From the initial

with the cooperation inside the Beijing East Side Village until the firsts public performances,

the desire of express a strong need of break the previous social conventions has always been

present in the artist’s works. Without the springboard of the artists’ collective community of

Beijing, probably Zhang Huan would never developed his critical spirit and the courage of

expressing himself as completely as he did. Despite, describing the figure of Zhang Huan is

not a pure attempting to investigate in his life and convictions, but is also a way to explore

the changing reality of the Chinese contemporary society, to which his path is deeply

attached. As the society and the Chinese recent history improved and reflected the hopes and

expectations of an entire Country, the art development went at the same speed. So, if at the

beginning of the last decade of the last century Zhang Huan felt the deep necessity to express

his fear and anger towards the historical moment he was living through the use of his own

body, nowadays his vision and necessities changed from the basis. The New York

parenthesis and the radical change of the setting Zhang Huan was involved in, reflected a

new stage of his path. While at the beginning he still continued to perform and to concentrate

all of his energies on it, slowly his focus became more and more distant from this first phase

of experimentations.

The collision with a new culture, with new stirrings, raised new questions in the artist mind.

How deep was the necessity to feeling at home in a different country? How can collide the

different sensation of be involved in a new culture in a different place? Due to these

questions the second phase of the artistic production of Zhang Huan was a radical change

with the previous one. Zhang in New York became more introspective, with a lesser desire

of break the rules and a deeper willingness of understand the world around him. The

conception of Local and Glocal always affected his thoughts from then until now. The New

York years were also the moment of intense travelling of Zhang Huan: not only with the

“My” series, spotted around the Western and Eastern worlds, but also with trips to more

spiritual locations. As he says in all his interviews, Buddhism has an important role in his

life and in his family memories. Actually, it is not possible to separate the behaviour of

85

Zhang Huan from the Buddhist lessons and rituals he assisted since his childhood. Anyway,

it is only with the first visits paid to Tibet that he approaches the doctrine in a newer way,

with more understanding and awareness. Since then, Buddhism completely revolutionised

his life. Not only in his productions, with more and more works focused on ash as main

material and with Buddhist figures as main subjects, but also in his personal and private life.

After he became a Buddhist, Zhang Huan’s life was deeply influenced by religious practices

and meditation. All the aspects of his new life are now in correlation with the conception of

Buddhist religion, from the way to approach difficulties to the concept of death, reborn and

salvation. Meditation became a milestone for Zhang Huan, and is possible to see the

changing also in his works. The subjects he decided to represents are commonly taken from

Buddhist tradition of Sutras and Mythological characters, in order to express the time he is

living, new feelings and new sensations. Zhang Huan’s conversion came just a little before

the return of the artist and his family to China, the third chapter of the artist life until now.

Coming back to China was just as a new beginning for him: “New York made me sick at

heart” is the most famous quote about the years in the U.S.A., where Zhang Huan spent

almost a decade of his life. The establishment of the new studio signed a more standard

approach to art, transforming him into a “salary man”, as he often described himself. Works

under commission, new characters and subjects and the constitution of a studio for the first

time in his life are all signals of the creative nature of this artist. Until today, Zhang Huan is

still developing this latest approach, working under commission and with a close squad of

helpers and co-workers in his studio. Perhaps, as it already happened in his artistic life, this

phase is going to change when he will discover even newer approaches and new expressions

of art. Unit then, Zhang Huan will always maintain his status of outstanding, eccentric and

yet devoted artist he gained throughout all of his career.

86

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88

SITOGRAPHY

Alex Greenberger, Gods and Monsters: Zhang Huan on ‘Semele,’ His Cross-Cultural

Opera, in “Artnews”, 2015, http://www.artnews.com/2015/03/02/gods-and-monsters-zhang-

huan-on-semele-his-cross-cultural-opera/ 5 Maggio 2019

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https://www.theartstory.org/artist-zhang-huan-artworks.htm 2019, 20 Aprile 2019

ANGIE Baecker, Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants Zhang Huan, in “Art Asia Pacific”,

2009,

http://www.artasiapacific.com/Magazine/66/StandingOnTheShouldersOfGiantsZhangHuan,

06 Marzo 2019

Chiu-ti Jansen, Skull Obsession: Religion and Opium in Zhang Huan’s Poppy Fields, in

“Sotheby’s”, 2013, https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/skull-obsession-religion-and-

opium-in-zhang-huans-poppy-fields, 4 Maggio 2019

Ellen Pearlman, Zhang Huan’s Painterly Buddhism, in “Hyperallergic”, 2013

https://hyperallergic.com/84883/zhang-huans-painterly-buddhism/, 4 Maggio 2019

Emmanuel Lincot, Contemporary Chinese Art Under Deng Xiaoping, in “China

Perspectives”, 2004, https://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/2952, 6 Giugno 2019

Giorgio Melis, Franco Demarchi, La Cina Contemporanea, in “Tutto Cina” 1996

https://www.tuttocina.it/tuttocina/filosofia/buddhismo.htm 15 Aprile 2019

Jon Sobel, Opera Review (NYC): Handel’s ‘Semele’ Directed by Zhang Huan at BAM, in

“Blogcritics” 2015, https://blogcritics.org/opera-review-nyc-handels-semele-directed-by-

zhang-huan-at-bam/ 6 Maggio 2019

Joseph Akel, For Zhang Huang, Love’s Battlefield Is a Ming Dynasty Temple, in

“Tmagazine”, 2015 https://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/06/zhang-huang-semele-

bam/?_r=1 5 Maggio 2019

Margherita Artoni, Zhang Huan, in “Flash Art”, 2015, https://flash---art.it/article/zhang-

huan/, 2 Maggio 2019

Matt Caron, The Symbolism Of Skulls In Hinduism & Buddhism, in “Sivana East”

https://blog.sivanaspirit.com/skulls-hinduism-buddhism/, 4 Maggio 2019

http://www.artnews.com/2015/03/02/gods-and-monsters-zhang-huan-on-semele-his-cross-cultural-opera/

http://www.artnews.com/2015/03/02/gods-and-monsters-zhang-huan-on-semele-his-cross-cultural-opera/


http://www.artasiapacific.com/Magazine/66/StandingOnTheShouldersOfGiantsZhangHuan

https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/skull-obsession-religion-and-opium-in-zhang-huans-poppy-fields

https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/skull-obsession-religion-and-opium-in-zhang-huans-poppy-fields

https://hyperallergic.com/84883/zhang-huans-painterly-buddhism/

https://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/2952

https://www.tuttocina.it/tuttocina/filosofia/buddhismo.htm

https://blogcritics.org/opera-review-nyc-handels-semele-directed-by-zhang-huan-at-bam/

https://blogcritics.org/opera-review-nyc-handels-semele-directed-by-zhang-huan-at-bam/

https://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/06/zhang-huang-semele-bam/?_r=1


https://flash---art.it/article/zhang-huan/

https://flash---art.it/article/zhang-huan/

https://blog.sivanaspirit.com/skulls-hinduism-buddhism/

89

Mi Qiu, Zhang Huan: after Nirvana a new life begins, “Zhang Huan Official Website”

http://www.zhanghuan.com/uploadfiles/Zhang%20Huan%20After%20Nirvana%20a%20Ne

w%20Life%20Begins.pdf 20 Aprile 2019

Minglu Gao, Pilgrimage to Santiago, in “Zhang Huan Official Website” 2000

http://www.zhanghuan.com/wzMF/info_74.aspx?itemid=1141, 20 Febbraio 2019

Ning Lu, How Chinese Art Became Contemporary, in “Artnet”, 2013,

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/how-chinese-art-became-contemporary-50469, 5 Giugno 2019

Rebecca Milzof, Temple of Doom: Zhang Huan Produces George Frideric Handel’s Semele,

In “Departures”, 2015, https://www.departures.com/art-culture/opera/semele-zhang-

huan-bam, 8 Giugno 2019

Rudi Mayer, Salvation in Buddhism, in “Journal of Adventist Mission Studies”, Vol. 10, 1,

Art. 3 ,2014,

https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1249&context=jams, 10

Aprile 2019

Rupert Christiansen, Zhang Huan: from baroque to Beijing, in “Telegraph”, 2009,

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/6043643/Zhang-Huan-from-baroque-to-

Beijing.html , 5 Maggio 2019

Sam Gaskin, Zhang Huan in Conversation, in “Ocula”, 2015,

https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/zhang-huan/,, 24 Aprile 2019

Seph Akel, For Zhang Huang, Love’s Battlefield Is a Ming Dynasty Temple, in

“Tmagazine”, 2015 https://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/06/zhang-huang-semele-

bam/?_r=1 5 Maggio 2019

Spring Poppy Fields: Exhibition of new works by Zhang Huan opens at Pace London, in

“ArtDaily.org”, 2014 http://artdaily.com/news/69660/Spring-Poppy-Fields--Exhibition-of-

new-works-by-Zhang-Huan-opens-at-Pace-London 2 Maggio 2019

Toby Kamps, Zhang Huan: Family Tree, in “Wichita State Univerisy”,

https://www.wichita.edu/museums/ulrich/Art/PermanentCollection/HuanFamily.php 15

Aprile 2019



http://www.zhanghuan.com/wzMF/info_74.aspx?itemid=1141

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https://news.artnet.com/art-world/how-chinese-art-became-contemporary-50469

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https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1249&context=jams

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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/6043643/Zhang-Huan-from-baroque-to-Beijing.html%205%20Maggio%202019

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https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/zhang-huan/



http://artdaily.com/news/69660/Spring-Poppy-Fields--Exhibition-of-new-works-by-Zhang-Huan-opens-at-Pace-London

http://artdaily.com/news/69660/Spring-Poppy-Fields--Exhibition-of-new-works-by-Zhang-Huan-opens-at-Pace-London

https://www.wichita.edu/museums/ulrich/Art/PermanentCollection/HuanFamily.php%2015%20Aprile%202019

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90

Wei Daoru, Buddhism in China and Modern Society: An Introduction Centering Around the

Teachings of Taixu and Yinshun http://www.totetu.org/assets/media/paper/j020_171.pdf,

15 Aprile 2019100

Winston Kyan, The Buddhist Resistance of Zhang Huan’s Pagoda, in “The art Journal

Open”, 2018 http://artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=10012 4 Maggio 2019

Zhang Huan, Great Leap Forward, in “LV Fpundation”, 2007,

https://www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr/en/the-collection/artworks/great-leap-forward.html 27

Aprile 2019

Zhang Huan, Rhino Trail, in “Tuskr”, https://www.tuskrhinotrail.com/artists/zhang-huan/, 4

Maggio 2019

Zhang Huan, Zhang Huan talks Tibet at Pace Gallery, In “Phaidon”, 2014,

https://www.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2014/may/01/zhang-huan-talks-tibet-at-pace-

gallery/ 2 Maggio 2019

http://www.totetu.org/assets/media/paper/j020_171.pdf

http://artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=10012

https://www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr/en/the-collection/artworks/great-leap-forward.html


https://www.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2014/may/01/zhang-huan-talks-tibet-at-pace-gallery/

https://www.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2014/may/01/zhang-huan-talks-tibet-at-pace-gallery/

Documents

Buddhist influences in Chinese art: Zhang Huan and the