Artist puts body and souls into work

Zhang Huan, one of the most recognizable Chinese names in Western art, turns his interests to incense ash

Former performance artist Zhang Huan has been internationally acclaimed in the past for getting naked in the name of art.

Now, the 45-year-old is fully clothed and shifting his interest from exposing his body to exploring the peacefulness of the soul - with the use of incense ash.

In the ongoing solo exhibition named Free Tiger Returns to Mountains in the 798 art district's Pace Gallery (from now to July 20), Zhang is showcasing his latest signature sculptures made from cowhide and his paintings incorporating incense ash. The ash medium, he says, contains a magical strength to comfort the soul.

After two years of preparation, Zhang is exhibiting dozens of tiger paintings in the show featuring images made from ash gathered in temples.

"The ash is a unique material to me. It holds and reflects people's hopes and wishes because people in China usually pray by burning incense," he said.

He said the name of his exhibition is also meaningful.

"It has something to do with the environment. Literally, it means freeing the endangered tigers and letting them return to where they belong. But it is also about the release of natural power and ecology becomes more harmonized because of it," he told METRO.

Born in Anyang, Henan province, in 1965, Zhang moved to Beijing and followed a classical curriculum at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, where he trained as a painter in the early 1990s.

After graduating from college, he lived in Beijing's then famous East Village, an avant-garde artist community in a run down area close to the luxurious Beijing Great Wall hotel. It was not long before he became known as an edgy performance artist who at times performed naked in front of the public.

He first achieved widespread attention in 1994 for his conceptual and performance art work 12 Square Meters, in which he sat nude and still in a dirty public toilet for one hour with his body smeared with a mixture of fish oil and honey to attract flies and insects to his skin.

And in another experimental performance piece, To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain, in 1995, Zhang and other 11 nude artists laid atop of one another in a blunted pyramid on a mountain.

Even after he moved to New York in 1998, Zhang was still using his body as his main medium, something that also sometimes revealed his quirky sense of humor.

For his 2002 visual art exhibition named My New York, Zhang dressed in a suit made of raw pork fashioned to look like bulging muscles and walked along the bustling street.

The meaning of the work might have been ambiguous, but critics thought Zhang 's suit was a metaphor for America's role as a world power.

During his time in the United States, he also traveled to other countries including Australia and Japan and started to focus more on photography, sculpture and large-scale installations.

Returning to China from New York in 2005, he settled down in Shanghai, choosing a city that had a "more open atmosphere" than the capital. In addition to the change in location, he changed his approach, choosing to no longer present performance art.

"Different ages should do different things and I don't want to repeat myself," he said.

He said the idea of painting with incense ash came to him when he visited a temple in Shanghai four years ago.

He said he was so excited after thinking of the concept that he "could not fall asleep at night".

"The ash to me is not simply a new material for my art. But it contains the collective souls and collective wishes nobody who prays with incense in the temples has the purpose of cursing others, they all pray for something good," he said.

He said the first time he and his colleagues knelt down in front of the incense ashes in their studio to begin the project it was like a religious ritual.

"It was so special that words cannot express. We felt like we were working with numerous souls in the ashes."

Since then the ash paintings have become one of his favored media to work in when he creates not just paintings but also sculptures and installations.

But at the same time, he continues to look for something new and creative.

One of his latest installation pieces created to honor the Shanghai Expo, He He Xie Xie, features a pair of mirror-finished stainless steel Pandas. It stands on the north Expo Axis to serve as a permanent public sculpture near the China Pavilion.

He also revealed that Handel's Semele, which is directed and has its stage designed by him, will tour in Beijing and Shanghai in October.

"The old Chinese saying always goes, 'those who submit shall prosper, those who resist will perish', but in the artistic world, I always stick to the truth that those who submit shall perish, while only those who resist will prosper," he said.

"Art is about innovation and making breakthroughs and so is mine."

China Daily