Published by White Cube. Edited by Honey Luard. Text by Richard Vine.
Known primarily for his demanding performances of the 1990s, Zhang Huan (born 1965) has more recently made paintings using incense ash gathered from ceremonies performed at Buddhist temples in Shanghai. This volume presents a series of ash paintings that refer to recent Chinese history.
The title of Zhang Huan’s latest monograph references the Buddhist concept of purgatory, in which the actions of the deceased are judged for seven weeks between death and rebirth. 49 Days utilizes 200 year-old reclaimed bricks, reworked by the artist into symbolic images such as skulls and pigs, which in turn form massive, disintegrating, mosaic-like sculptures.
Published by Charta / Asia Society. Foreword by Vishakha N. Desai. Text by Melissa Chiu, Kong Bu, Eleanor Heartney.
Zhang Huan (born in China in 1965 and currently living in Shanghai) may be best known for his first performance, which sparked the cancellation of the group show at which it was staged. Of that encounter with China's censorship machinery, he says, "They had me write a self-criticism and pay a fine…for my 'misdeed,' promising that the exhibition would be reopened. I did what they said only for the sake of the show. But it was never opened." He continued exploring performance in private events--once testing the relationship between physical endurance and spiritual tranquility by covering himself with honey and lying in a squalid public toilet covered in flies--but he has never held another public performance in China. Zhang has been exploring cross-cultural life, and lately making introspective and even spiritual work, invoking the temporality of material existence by lying on a bed of ice surrounded by dogs at New York's P.S.1, for example. His critically acclaimed work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Saatchi Collection, the MacArthur Foundation and Yale University. Copublished with the Asia Society.
PUBLISHER Charta / Asia Society
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 9.5 x 11.25 in. / 180 pgs / 113 color / 47 bw
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 10/15/2007 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2007 p. 133
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9788881586417TRADE List Price: $65.00 CAD $75.00
Published by Hatje Cantz. Artwork by Zhang Huan. Edited by Yilmaz Dziewior.
Among the first Chinese artists to turn to performance art, Zhang Huan, a member of the "Beijing East Village" community, focused, in his early work, on submitting his naked body to extreme psychological and physical situations. Of late, theatricality and narrative have played increasing larger roles in his work, as in a 1997 piece in which he commissioned a group of farmworkers to climb into a fish pond near Beijing, thus creating an image representing the flooding of cities by masses from the country.
Zhang Huan: 49 Days
Zhang Huan: Altered States
Zhang Huan