Zhang Huan is one of the most compelling and best recognized artists to have emerged from this community. He is widely recognized for recording his body through extreme states of discomfort in his endurance-challenging staged performance art. His visceral sometimes confounding imagery placed him as one of the foremost members of a group of radical avant-garde artists who surged onto the art scene during the 1990s. Younger than many of his contemporaries, Zhang was born in 1965 and came of age as an artist after the 1985 New Wave art movement in China, the feelings of desolation in his early works coming directly and quite literally from his social displacement and feelings of alienation in the post-Tiananmen period.
As his career has evolved, he has moved away from his early, more confrontational imagery, and instead worked in a variety of media, developing his own mythic symbolic systems, though often still with his own figure as a central motif. Using a camera to create more intimate and personal work, Zhang's photography retains a connection to self-portraiture and a consideration of the artist's and individual's relationship to a larger society, a dominant theme among his contemporaries throughout this period, foregrounding personal responses to the binding sets of Confucian filial and social relationships in traditional Chinese society.
From a Distinguished European Collection of Contemporary Art, Family Tree (2000) (Lot 2032) is one of Zhang's best recognized works and one of the most iconic works of Chinese contemporary art in any media. In this piece, Zhang offers a series of nine photographs which views of the artist's face progressively covered by Chinese calligraphy scribed in black ink. The artist invited two calligraphers to write texts of Chinese proverbs and folklore on his face, a laborious and painstaking process that took from early morning to night, and one that gives material expression to Zhang's conflicted feelings towards traditional society. Reflecting on the piece and its symbolism, "I cannot tell who I am. My identity has disappeared." In each consecutive photograph, Zhang's face slowly disappears underneath the amassment of Chinese calligraphy and in the final photograph his face becomes completely unrecognizable, like a void sinking into the background of the image where you come to feel the complexity of socio-cultural relations that stifles any sense of individuality.
Zhang's shift away from works of pure endurance and confrontation to more visually poetic and philosophical works is concomitant with his move, at this time, from Beijing to New York, a move that both compelled him to recalibrate his relationships to his cultural heritage. Zhang remains defiant as ever, but the slow obliteration of his features suggests the precariousness of his fierce individuality. In this captivating and evocative series of photographs, we can perceive how Zhang identifies himself with his Chinese geneaology but nonetheless attempts to liberate himself from its traditional system of debt and obligation. As Zhang puts it, "more culture is slowly smothering us and turning our faces black. It is impossible to take away your inborn blood and personality. I always feel that some mysterious fate surrounds human life which you can do nothing about, you can do nothing to control it, it just happened."