From NY to Dawn of Time

Zhang Huan, one of the most sensational performance artists in China's contemporary art scene, is continuing to push boundaries with his first solo show in China.

Called Dawn of Time, it features three pieces of installation art and two paintings, and is running at Shanghai Art Museum until Sunday.

The artist, who hails from Henan province, says he felt rootless after living in New York since 1998, but things changed for the better after he relocated to Shanghai five years ago. "I feel at home in Shanghai, and soon found new inspiration and creative materials here, be it burned incense ashes from temples, or old windows, bricks and tiles from dismantled old buildings," the artist said before the opening of the exhibition.

Zhang, 45, has forged a reputation as a pioneering artist in China since the early 1990s. Using his body as a means of expression and taking public spaces as his canvas, he pushes the boundaries of contemporary art to extreme contexts, according to Xiao Xiaolan, the curator of Dawn of Time.

In his 1994 project, 12 Square Meters, Zhang covered his body in fish oil and honey and sat motionless in a putrid public toilet, in Beijing's East Village for an hour, allowing flies and insects to cover his body.

In 2002, after moving to the United States, he staged a performance for the Whitney Biennial named My New York, during which he walked on stage dressed only in a suit made from strips of raw beef.

In 2005 he established his Shanghai studio in Songjiang district. For his first solo exhibition in China, Zhang is taking the best of what his studio has produced over the past five years. In addition to two giant paintings made from the ash of burnt incense, he also presents three installation works, of which Dawn of Time is the richly symbolic centerpiece.

It features a truck unloading a pile of building debris, with a stuffed pony standing on top of a pile of bricks. The work, an allegory for the monumental transformation of China in recent years, hints at both the formation of a consumer-based society and China's nationwide building frenzy.

By using pillars and gray bricks taken from demolished houses in Shanghai, Zhang speaks of the cost of China's hunger to modernize, and the violent destruction of the past.

"I work on the principle that art should have three parts," Zhang says. "Seventy percent should be beautiful in a way that is acceptable to the public, 15 percent should be beautiful in a way that is beyond people's experience, and the rest should go beyond what people can endure."

The second installation work, Pagoda, manages to combine farmyard animals with religion.

Zhang adopted one of three pigs, rescued 40 days after the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, named it Zhu Gangqiang (cast-iron pig) and raised it at his studio in Shanghai, where it inspired him to meditate on life and death. He later built a bell-shaped pagoda with old bricks and placed a stuffed pig in the part usually reserved for statues of the Bodhisattva.

Curator Xiao says it is impossible not to be awed by the intensity and strength of Zhang's art. "He has always focused on such subjects as individuals versus the environment, or individuals versus survival, and you can find a logical continuation in his choice of media," Xiao says.

No longer restricting himself to using his body to express his ideas, Zhang made a 6-m-tall sculpture of an ox hide for his third work, Hero, which he expects to turn some viewers off due to its inescapably visceral nature.

Daily, until Sunday

Shanghai Art Museum, 325 Nanjing Xilu

021-6327-2829

(China Daily 02/22/2010 page18)