Zhang Huan: Altered States

At the Vancouver Art Gallery until October 5

Through much of Zhang Huan’s impressive career, his body has been his most eloquent and abused medium.

During his early years as a performance artist in Beijing, he subjected himself to extremes of endurance and self-abasement. He bled from self-inflicted wounds while hanging from the ceiling bound in chains; sat all day in a public toilet, his bare body covered with flies (attracted by the fish oil and honey he’d smeared on himself); wrapped himself in the rib cages of newly slaughtered pigs; and lay naked on a concrete floor for an hour while being showered with white-hot sparks from a metal screw cutter.

In 1995, thugs who may have been police officers assaulted him in a Beijing bar and cut his head open. This attack certainly could be interpreted as an authoritarian reaction to the artist’s subversive and yet somehow penitential practice. For Zhang Huan, the price of art has long been pain and suffering.

Zhang Huan: Altered States, organized and circulated by the New York–based Asia Society, is a compelling (although overcrowded) introduction to one of China’s most acclaimed artists.

Installed on one half of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s third floor, it surveys his output over the past two decades. The first part of the show comprises photographic and video documentation of his powerful performances. The second part focuses on Zhang’s recent monumental sculptures, ash paintings, and woodcuts, many of them based on found images, objects, and materials. References to recent Chinese history, politics, culture, religion, and militarism abound.

Born in Anyang City, Henan province, in 1965, Zhang launched his career in considerable poverty and deprivation, in a garbage-heaped, outlying area of Beijing. In 1998, he moved to New York, then returned to China in 2006 to set up a studio. In an astonishing turn of fortune, he now operates out of a vast former factory in Shanghai and employs numerous artists and artisans in the execution of his ambitious works.

Among the performances documented here are Skin, in which he uses his hands to push, pull, and hide his handsome face, and Family Tree, in which his face is gradually covered by black-inked calligraphy.

In To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain, he and eight colleagues, stripped naked, form a human pyramid on a mountaintop, and in To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond, he and 40 migrant workers stand in various formations in a man-made pond. As essayist Eleanor Heartney writes in the exhibition catalogue, Zhang’s performance works shifted over time from “private introspection toward an embrace of larger communities and contexts”.

A line running through Zhang’s art is his enduring relationship to Buddhism. In a 1998 performance, Pilgrimage—Wind and Water in New York, he threw himself down repeatedly on gravel-covered ground, imitating the prostrations of Buddhist pilgrims, to the sounds of Tibetan Buddhist music.

In his Shanghai studio, he has produced immense self-portrait busts using ash gathered from burnt offerings and incense in Buddhist temples. He has also created huge representations of the fingers and limbs broken off Buddhist statuary during China’s Cultural Revolution. These works function as a kind of reclamation of belief and, through it, a declaration of freedom.