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Lot Essay
Zhang Huan is one of the most compelling avant-garde artists to emerge from Beijing's East Village performance scene in the early mid-1990s, widely recognized for rapidly gaining international recognition for the evocative imagery of his photography and his physically challenging staged performance art. His performances, sculptures, drawings, and photo-based works, including many prominent public commissions, have earned him a reputation as one of the leading Chinese artists working in contemporary art today. Across these different media, Zhang examines and questions humanity and spirituality to critically address and reflect upon China's changing environment and culture.
Born in 1965 in Anyang, a town in the Henan Province of China, Zhang's earliest works from the 1990s set the vanguard for performance art in his country. The confrontational and sometimes confounding imagery recorded from his performances involved exposing his own body to physically grueling acts that contained within them connections to self-portraiture and notions of the self that were an essential part of avant-garde Chinese discourse, and which continue to play a pivotal role in his conceptual art practice. As Zhang participated more and more in international art exhibitions, this relationship as a Chinese artist in Western institutions, and the politics of representation and of collecting, also became important themes in his works.
In 2001, Zhang made his first widely recognized sculpture, Rubens (Lot 2033) which grew out of a performance piece of the same title. Zhang drew his inspiration from the infamous painting by Peter Paul Rubens, The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (Fig. 1), and the resulting performance, which took place in a church in Ghent, Belgium, hometown of the painter with whom Zhang felt an affinity. Sixty people, including collectors of his works, were invited by Zhang to participate in the performance to enact scenes inspired by the painting, dressed in period costume and enacting a kind of crude violence on the literal body of the artist. In this way, he also references Yoko Ono's famous performance, Cut Piece, performed in Tokyo in 1964, wherein she invited the audience to cut off pieces of her outfit until she was fully naked (fig. xxx). In Rubens, Zhang takes on the feminized role of the victim, subject to the machinations, desires, and cruelty of the art world audience. The artist closed the performance after the course of an hour with a poem by Li Shangyin, a poet from the late Tang Dynasty: "Sunset so beautiful, but it is close to dusk," about which Zhang commented that it "is about getting older, about beautiful things ending."
Rubens marked a turning point in Zhang's art practice as he chose to make his first sculpture as a self-portrait that would later become a characteristic in his body of work, in which he "concretized the performance", and in this concretization adds new and additional layers to the work. A life-sized bronze sculpture with gold patina in the cast of Zhang's nude body stands rigid with firsts formed, similar to the posture of the Chinese terracotta warriors. Amassed by twenty or so hands cast from the participants of the original performance, they swarm around and grope the golden figure, pushing him forward, blinding him, or cheating him-pronouncing the body's obligation in conflicting social conditions that is analogous to his use of his own body in performances. The implicit references of the hand gestures is an ironic commentary on the artist's and individual's relationship to a larger society, and also on Zhang's position as an internationally-acclaimed artist, as he himself drolly remarked, "Everyone loves the artist now, transformed into a Buddha." As one of the earliest and significant sculptures from Zhang, Rubens embodies the heart of Zhang's own evolution from performance artist to the material manifestation in of his concepts into spectacular, provocative sculptures and installations.
Born in 1965 in Anyang, a town in the Henan Province of China, Zhang's earliest works from the 1990s set the vanguard for performance art in his country. The confrontational and sometimes confounding imagery recorded from his performances involved exposing his own body to physically grueling acts that contained within them connections to self-portraiture and notions of the self that were an essential part of avant-garde Chinese discourse, and which continue to play a pivotal role in his conceptual art practice. As Zhang participated more and more in international art exhibitions, this relationship as a Chinese artist in Western institutions, and the politics of representation and of collecting, also became important themes in his works.
In 2001, Zhang made his first widely recognized sculpture, Rubens (Lot 2033) which grew out of a performance piece of the same title. Zhang drew his inspiration from the infamous painting by Peter Paul Rubens, The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (Fig. 1), and the resulting performance, which took place in a church in Ghent, Belgium, hometown of the painter with whom Zhang felt an affinity. Sixty people, including collectors of his works, were invited by Zhang to participate in the performance to enact scenes inspired by the painting, dressed in period costume and enacting a kind of crude violence on the literal body of the artist. In this way, he also references Yoko Ono's famous performance, Cut Piece, performed in Tokyo in 1964, wherein she invited the audience to cut off pieces of her outfit until she was fully naked (fig. xxx). In Rubens, Zhang takes on the feminized role of the victim, subject to the machinations, desires, and cruelty of the art world audience. The artist closed the performance after the course of an hour with a poem by Li Shangyin, a poet from the late Tang Dynasty: "Sunset so beautiful, but it is close to dusk," about which Zhang commented that it "is about getting older, about beautiful things ending."
Rubens marked a turning point in Zhang's art practice as he chose to make his first sculpture as a self-portrait that would later become a characteristic in his body of work, in which he "concretized the performance", and in this concretization adds new and additional layers to the work. A life-sized bronze sculpture with gold patina in the cast of Zhang's nude body stands rigid with firsts formed, similar to the posture of the Chinese terracotta warriors. Amassed by twenty or so hands cast from the participants of the original performance, they swarm around and grope the golden figure, pushing him forward, blinding him, or cheating him-pronouncing the body's obligation in conflicting social conditions that is analogous to his use of his own body in performances. The implicit references of the hand gestures is an ironic commentary on the artist's and individual's relationship to a larger society, and also on Zhang's position as an internationally-acclaimed artist, as he himself drolly remarked, "Everyone loves the artist now, transformed into a Buddha." As one of the earliest and significant sculptures from Zhang, Rubens embodies the heart of Zhang's own evolution from performance artist to the material manifestation in of his concepts into spectacular, provocative sculptures and installations.