April 21, 2012 |
Indeed, Zhang Huan’s recent accolades include directing Handel’s opera Semele at the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels in 2009, for which he imported a 450-year-old Bhuddist temple for the set and inserted a Mongolian choir within the original music. In 2006 he set up the Gaoan Foundation to further Buddhist and cultural projects, and to create Zhang Huan Elementary Schools throughout provinces in China and Tibet. Meanwhile his massive studio in a former factory in Shanghai has given employment to the surviving traditional Dongyang woodcarvers, a seriously endangered species, who have collaborated with Huan on carvings switched on to contemporary issues.
Huan first made a name for himself in the early 1990s, with gruelling performances so threatening to the authorities that he has been prevented from showing images of them in China – witness the abrupt cancellation of his retrospective at the Shanghai Art Museum in 2008. For 12M2, Huan stripped off, coated himself in fish sauce and honey and sat in a Beijing public loo until he was entirely covered in flies; 65KG saw him trussed up and hung from a ceiling, while his blood dripped via a catheter to sizzle on a hotplate below.
In recent years, he has given up performance, exploring his interests in traditional Chinese craft and his Buddhist principles in sculpture and painting. One of his favourite mediums is incense ash. He has created a vast statue of Bhuddha (Berlin Bhuddha, 2007) with the powdery, transient medium and used it as pigment in elegiac, graphite-hued paintings. While his realist depictions of iconic figures, such as the monk and scholar Master Sheng Yen, might seem a world away from his shocking early works, he has lost none of his genius for the challenging and unconventional.
Huan’s 2009 London debut at White Cube saw him install a pigpen in the gallery, replete with snuffling piglets. Along with sombre portraits of a be-snouted, spotted, floppy-eared fellow, it was all in homage to the Cast Iron Pig, the sturdy survivor of the massive earthquake that hit China’s Sichuan Province in 2008. This porcine hero was not only a symbol of fortitude in the face of catastrophe. Before its owners rescued it, the pig had managed to sustain itself on rainwater and old timber, for 49 days, the amount of time between death and the transmigration, according to Buddhists. This year, for his exhibition, East Wind, West Wind, at Espace Louis Vuitton in Macau (a city that, like Hong Kong, maintains its own legal system), work included a politically pointed carving of machinists in a garment factory. Indeed, Zhang is an artist who brings real meaning to the phrase “socially engaged”.
by Skye Sherwin
