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Lot Essay
Chinese artist Zhang Huan first emerged from Beijing's so-called East Village performance scene in the early mid-1990s, rapidly gaining international recognition for the powerful imagery of his photography and his often physically grueling performance art. After nearly a decade based in New York, Zhang returned to China in 2005. This move signaled a significant change in his art practice. Setting up a factory-like studio in Shanghai, Zhang immediately began producing an astonishing new body of work in a variety of media - large-scale bronze sculptures, multi-media installations (some involving animal hides), paintings, drawings, and prints.
Zhang has always been inspired by Buddhist principles, and he was originally inspired by incense ash itself as a medium during a visit to Longhua Temple in Shanghai. Soon after he began incorporating it into his works, first in sculptures and eventually in his now iconic ash-paintings, eventually gathering hundreds of pounds of ash weekly from over 20 temples around Shanghai, separating it into different grades and hues. Zhang would transform the materials into "paintings", meticulously applying the different shades to build up his images on stretched canvases. In the monumental work featured here, Liberation Army, executed in 2007, Zhang has now fully mastered his new craft. Depicting the anonymous figure of a People's Liberation Army soldier, the tonality of the material is at first severe, softened slightly by the subtle ochre tones of the ash. The surface of the painting his rough and mottled, reminiscent of ancient sculptures worn down by time and weather. Once again, the artist is delving into the imagery and collective memory of his generation, finding new means to express his complex feeling on China's cultural and historical legacies. But here he does not so much reduce the Communist project to that of merely an antiquated monument, but instead imbues it with a transcendent, philosophical view of time, drawing our attention to dramas of history and their fundamental ephemerality. As Zhang Huan refines his experiments with unusual materials and methods, continuing to surprise audiences with some of the most powerful and poetic artworks of contemporary art, firmly establishing himself as one of the great visionaries of our time.
Zhang has always been inspired by Buddhist principles, and he was originally inspired by incense ash itself as a medium during a visit to Longhua Temple in Shanghai. Soon after he began incorporating it into his works, first in sculptures and eventually in his now iconic ash-paintings, eventually gathering hundreds of pounds of ash weekly from over 20 temples around Shanghai, separating it into different grades and hues. Zhang would transform the materials into "paintings", meticulously applying the different shades to build up his images on stretched canvases. In the monumental work featured here, Liberation Army, executed in 2007, Zhang has now fully mastered his new craft. Depicting the anonymous figure of a People's Liberation Army soldier, the tonality of the material is at first severe, softened slightly by the subtle ochre tones of the ash. The surface of the painting his rough and mottled, reminiscent of ancient sculptures worn down by time and weather. Once again, the artist is delving into the imagery and collective memory of his generation, finding new means to express his complex feeling on China's cultural and historical legacies. But here he does not so much reduce the Communist project to that of merely an antiquated monument, but instead imbues it with a transcendent, philosophical view of time, drawing our attention to dramas of history and their fundamental ephemerality. As Zhang Huan refines his experiments with unusual materials and methods, continuing to surprise audiences with some of the most powerful and poetic artworks of contemporary art, firmly establishing himself as one of the great visionaries of our time.