 n little more than a decade, Zhang Huan has leapfrogged from being an obscure Beijing underground artist into an immensely successful star. He has recently had many international exhibitions and has profited grandly from the rising market for contemporary Chinese art.
In much of his current controversial New York Asia Society exhibition, Altered States, Zhang presents photographs of himself performing various feats. Some push physical limits, others pose riddles. It is striking that he is the subject of over half the exhibition.
Curator Melissa Chiu invited Zhang Huan to contribute to her informative catalogue about the show by writing about himself. The artist notes that as a child his life was difficult and he was frequently challenged to physically defend himself. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), he grew up tough in rural Henan province with grandparents who did not encourage or praise him.
 In middle school, a teacher spotted his drawing ability and suggested that he pursue a career in art, which he did. He learned the Chinese Communist canonical style, which was Soviet Socialist Realism which had been based on French Academic Realism. Part of this official art idea was to reproduce an image exactly as one sees it in nature, like a photograph. To make the bottle on the table look just as you see it in life.
In 1991 Zhang Huan convinced the leadership of the provincial Zhengzhou Teachers College to send him to graduate school in China’s art Mecca, the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. There he was required to paint in the same artistic mode that he had earlier found to be meaningless. But he also had the opportunity to read about the international art world beyond China and meet other artists who were similarly disenchanted with “official” art.
During the 1980s, a number of young Chinese artists had gone beyond the circle of official exhibitions and experimented with performance art, which became a favored means of expression. By the 1990s, as he was casting around, the idea of using his body as the mode of expression felt right for Zhang, since his body had always served as his battleground. He wanted to express his situation, what his life was really like.
In 1993 he rented a peasant house cheaply in the northeastern section of Beijing. Other similarly disaffected artists joined him in what  became an experimental artistic community. They named it the “East Village” after a famous New York artistic enclave.
While settled in this “East Village”, which lacked modern plumbing, in 1994 Zhang Huan produced his signature piece, 12 Meters Square, a photograph of himself naked sitting in an outhouse and covered with flies. It is both arresting and horrifying. His entire performance: walking into the neighborhood latrine and then sitting there, naked, with shaved head, tortured by flying stingers, is shown on video. But it is the photograph that is so haunting and compelling. It brought him wide attention and became his singular artistic product.
He continued to create many performances that were recorded as videos as well as photographs like 1997’s To Raise the Water Level of the Fish Pond. The next year it was chosen as poster child for “Inside Out”, the first International Chinese “avant garde” exhibition at The Asia Society and P.S. 1 in New York. To advertise the exhibition the image was widely shown as an ad in the local subways.
Coincidentally, in the early 1990s, Chinese photography had just been revolutionized by high-resolution technology. Thus, Chinese restless artists like Zhang Huan could begin to create large, high quality photographs such as those that were currently produced in the West. Many Chinese artists seized  on photography as a new possibility on the international art stage.
“Altered States” includes other Zhang Huan performances in the US, and all are a bit mind-bending. In the catalogue he writes of his difficulty adjusting to American society and how hard it is to truly connect with these non-Chinese people. In Pilgrimage-Wind and Water, which was photographed in the P.S. 1 courtyard, he is lying stoically on a bed of ice, and one wonders whether he is acting out his attempt to connect with American society by using his body heat to melt the ice slabs.
Zhang Huan left the U.S. in 2005 to return to China. This appears to have been a genuine homecoming, a return to the imagery of his youth and a spiritual re-awakening. He recalled omnipresent Cultural Revolution visual exhortations of his youth. This led him to find wooden doors from old buildings in the Chinese countryside, a symbolic reopening into that era. He then reused the doors as his canvas, pasting photographs of remembered compositions on the wooden panels. He not only glued prints of those scenes on the doors but also had his workshop carvers whittle away the parts he specified to make relief pictures, a Memory Door series, Meeting Table, Break, and Dam. Attractive and nostalgic, they have already found patronage.
 The same year he returned to China he traveled to Tibet, which apparently rekindled his youthful Buddhist consciousness. He states: “I am a Buddhist inside, I am an artist outside.” He was horrified to see body parts of Buddhist images, arms and legs that had been hacked away during the Cultural Revolution, that were then on sale in the local markets. Deeply troubled by this travesty, he created a mammoth enlarged copper arm and leg, Fresh Open Buddha Hand and Head from Buddha’s foot. His own head emerges from the heel of the latter. What is his message? Is he saying that he was born again from the Buddha’s foot?
The exhibition’s climax is Long Ear Ash Head, a 13 ft. self-portrait head. The clear-cut top cranium is suspended over the restarted face from eyes to just below the nose (missing mouth and chin), with ears so long that they fold flat out front on the floor. The long ears suggest Zhang is making his head like the image of Buddha. The head is constructed of metal and wood but completely covered with ash. Ash is Zhang’s newest material, special ash collected from Buddhist temples all over the Shanghai area. There is a millennial tradition of burning incense, offered at countless Buddhist temples to the many Buddhist divinities. The ash carries so many hopes and dreams, wishes to pacify spirits of the ancestors and to generally make life good. The ash carrying these sacred and profane wishes of millions of Chinese people is loaded with meaning. The head has a small child on top as well as a tiny Buddha on the nose. Is Zhang Huan telling us that is where his head is, in a higher realm of Buddhist heaven?
 Curator Melissa Chiu has made an upbeat selection of Zhang Huan’s work. She deselected some of his early, most extreme performances such as “Angel”, which deals with abortion via a baby doll and himself covered with red paint. This was a comment on the fate of many young women unarmed with contraception and trapped by their sexual engagement. There were other raw performances in which Zhang Huan tests the limits of his mortality.
This first New York museum solo exhibition of his work assures Zhang Huan a place in the magic circle of the international Chinese art scene, so hot with million dollar auction sales. Most artists who reach this golden stage nevertheless yearn to see their work in among the Rembrandts in museum collections. Zhang is edging closer.
 Joan Lebold Cohen, author of “The New Chinese Painting, 1949-1986”, has been writing about contemporary Chinese art for more than 35 years.
Related Links:
·Artist Profile: Zhang Huan
·Zhang Huan: Banned in Shanghai
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