Asian Avenue magazine

The recent rotation in the Modern & Contemporary Department at the Denver Art Museum (DAM) has brought out many previously seldom-exhibited works from the permanent collection. Among them is one of the best-known photographs by internationally-acclaimed Chinese artist Zhang Huan, now on display on the 3rd floor of the Hamilton Building.

Zhang Huan, born in 1965 to a farming family in Anyang, Henan province, studied painting both at Henan University and at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. But, living in considerable poverty with a number of other artists in a communal environment in what they called “East Village” in Beijing, he took to a new and, to the minds of many at that time, shocking form of self-expression. He became one of China’s first practitioners of performance art, using his own, often naked, body to address ideas of the self in contemporary society.

As the artist states on his website, www.zhanghuan.com “I prefer to put my body in physical conditions that ordinary people have not experienced. It is only in such conditions that I am able to experience the relationship between the body and the spirit.”

His performances are indeed records of his personal spiritual journey, but as well as bringing attention to the plight of the artist, they also often present a poignant picture of the individual and the environment.

The work on exhibit in DAM, “To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond,” records a 1997 performance in Beijing in which Zhang Huan invited 40 migrant laborers to join him naked in a local fi shpond. Though these individuals were all from the bottom rung of society, they together were in this way able to raise the level of the water, though as Zhang Huan points out that is “an action of no avail.”

Another DAM-owned work by Zhang can also be found in Denver, not at the museum itself, but placed as public art in Riverside Park downtown. “Pilgrimage” is a life-sized granite sculpture of Zhang Huan himself lying face down and naked. The work memorializes the artist’s first performance in New York City in 1998 after he had moved to the US.

In the performance, Zhang prostrated himself as if on solemn pilgrimage towards a traditional Chinese bed on which lay blocks of ice. He then lay naked and still for 10 minutes on the ice. In a commentary on the performance, Zhang Huan confesses, “I do like the city, but at the same time I have an unnameable fear. I want to feel it with my body, just as I feel the ice. I try to melt off a reality in the way I try to melt off the ice with the warmth of my body.”

Zhang Huan now spends as much time back in China as he does in the US. His art remains controversial – a show planned recently for the Shanghai Museum of Art was recently cancelled at the last moment – but its presence in major art museums and galleries in the US testifi es to his growing international reputation.

For more information on Asian and contemporary art at the Denver Art Museum, or how to get involved with the museum’s member organizations, log on to http://exhibits.denverartmuseum.org/asianart or http://damcontemporaries.denverartmuseum.org.

By Tom Whitten, Researcher, Asian Art Department