ZHANG HUAN

Zhang Huan is a Chinese painter, photographer, sculptor, performance artist, and opera director whose work often engages with Buddhist philosophy and his own conflicted feelings toward it. Huan is best known for his time-intensive performances that have tested his own physical and mental endurance. The layers of ideas the artist explored in his early performance art, conceived of as existential explorations and social commentaries, have carried through to the more traditional studio practice he embraced upon moving to Shanghai in 2005, after living and working for eight years in New York City.

ABOUT THE WORK:

Shortly before Zhang Huan left China to temporarily relocate to the United States, he performed a work of art in which he invited friends to write phrases or words on his face and body with black ink. In this resulting self-portrait, Huan's ethnicity is literally inscribed on his body. Yet for most Western viewers the text is unreadable, resulting in a visual metaphor for the difficult transcultural experience upon which Huan was about to embark. As an Asian body circulating within a Western culture, Huan understood that "the body is the only direct way through which I come to know society and society comes to know me. The body is the proof of identity. The body is language." Atop the writing, Huan wears an animal carcass as armor, embracing the decaying rib cage in a disturbing and defying act.