Artist Profiles

Zhang Huan

(www.zhanghuan.com) Zhang Huan was born in Henan Province, China in l965, and currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. He received his Master of Fine Arts in Oil Painting from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and has been involved in performance work there since the early l990's. Zhang is considered one of the most influential artists who belonged to the group “Beijing East Village”, a kind of art colony located in the rural outskirts of Beijing. There artists would perform works exploring issues surrounding consumerism, sexuality, gender and personal suffering in or around their homes. Zhang chooses performance as his primary art form because of its inherent relationship with the body. The performance "To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain" took place in the Chinese countryside; several performers lie on top of the other in a blunted pyramid; it is an odd but affecting image which takes human presence and renders it anonymous. Zhang Huan conceived o! f "My America" (originally titled "Hard to Acclimatize") as a concentrated pilgrimage, fusing Eastern and Western approaches to spirituality. It derived from the artist's difficulties in adapting to America, but also celebrates the new freedom he has found in this country filtered through his more Eastern spiritual visions. His works are in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's Kent & Vicki Logan Collection; the Marieluise Hessel Foundation Collection at Bard College, the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan, and the Rubell Family Collection.

Other Works By This Artist [ click to view larger images ]