Zhang Huan’s 125 Newbury Show Is Not for the Weak
Paintings, footage and photographs by China’s most extreme performance artist.
Summary
- Pace Gallery has unveiled a new solo exhibition by Chinese artist Zhang Huan at 125 Newbury in New York
- Titled Ash Paintings and Performances, the show features previously unseen documentation of Zhang’s shocking, body-based performances, alongside a selection of sculpture, painting and photographs
The body has no limits, according to Zhang Huan. One of the most extreme names in Chinese contemporary art, Huan made his name through performances that, often shockingly, tested the physical and conceptual boundaries of human form to explore memory, labor, impermanence and resilience.
At 125 Newbury, Huan’s work reenters the New York spotlight in Ash Paintings and Performances, a new show by Pace Gallery. Curated by Arne Glimcher, the exhibition gathers never-before-seen documentation of Zhang’s most iconic performances from the ’90s and ’00s, presented in dialogue with photographs, sculptures and incense ash paintings.
Born in Anyang, Henan Province in 1965, Zhang emerged as a leading figure of Beijing’s conceptual art movement. In the early 90’s, he took part in Beijing East Village, an experimental artist community on the city’s outskirts, remembered for their provocative collaborations with an emphasis on collective action. In 1994, Zhang led one of the group’s most talked about works, “12 Square Meters,” where he sat naked in an outhouse, letting flies collect on his honey-covered body for hours.
While exploring the endurance of a single body, much of his oeuvre focused on poetic and ecologically involved expressions of collective action. Highlights at the Newbury show include “To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain” (1995), when he recruited a group to lay in a pile atop a mountain to temporarily “raise” its summit; and “In To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond” (1997), where a group of laborers came together to raise a pond by one meter.
Alongside performances, the exhibition features standouts like his titular ash paintings, created out of mounds of ash disposed at Buddhist temples, and selections from the his Memory Door series.
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Marking his first New York solo in over a decade, the show brings his Big Apple tenure to the forefront. Zhang’s stint in New York lasted from 1998 to 2006, and during that time, his work became heavily informed by immigrant identity and cultural adjustment, concepts that loomed over his personal life. Such ideas were channeled in his 2002 Whitney Biennial performance, “My New York,” also at Newbury, where he took to the city streets in a Hulk-like suit made of meat, to emphasize the inherent animalism in humanity; or “1/2 (Text),” a bodily, text-based metaphor for the transcultural throes he found himself in.
“The body is the only direct way through which I come to know society and society comes to know me,” he once said. “The body is the proof of identity. The body is language.”
Zhuang Huan: Ash Paintings and Performances is now on view through April 4.
125 Newbury
395 Broadway,
New York, NY 10013
