| Zhang Huan: Drawings. Cat. Rais. Vol 1 1951 - 1955 Contributor(s): Gisbourne, Mark (Contribution by) |
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ISBN: 3829603088 ISBN-13: 9783829603089 Publisher: Schirmer Mosel OUR PRICE: $44.96 Product Type: Hardcover Language: German Published: July 2007 Annotation: 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. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Art | Asian - General - Art | Individual Artists - General |
| Dewey: 709.2 |
| Physical Information: 0.67" H x 9.29" W x 13.61" (2.40 lbs) 108 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - Chinese |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Co-founder of the artists' group "Beijing East Village," Chinese performance artists Zhang Huan caused a real stir in the 1990s with his disturbing interventionist actions, videos, and installations. Often using his own body, his presentation of themes specific to China, such as doctrinaire family planning, over-population, and mass migration from the country into cities soon attracted the ire of the state guardians of culture. Today, Zhang Huan lives between New York and Shanghai. Elements of his own traditional Chinese culture have since melded with Western ideas, Christian symbols, and Occidental art history. For the last two years, Zhang Huan has focused exclusively on drawings. In his large-format "Images of Imagination and Desire" (ink and wood-cuts featuring traces of ash and soy sauce) people and above all animals enter into a significant and often bizarre game with their own, forever metaphorical identity - and our imagination. |