When Sotheby’s held its auction of Chinese art in 2006 and netted $12 million for works by the likes of Xu Bing, Ai Weiwei and former enfant terrible Zhang Huan, capitalism’s thirst for the Middle Kingdom’s contemporary art suddenly became obvious to far more than a few collectors and curators. Chinese artists are now bona fide stars because they command the cash at auction to make them so.
The recent retrospective of Zhuang Hang’s early performance art and later sculptural works at New York’s Asia Society marks another watershed for the forty-three year old farmer’s son from Henan province who first shocked the Chinese art world by staging a mock abortion in front of the Academy of Arts in Beijing in 1993 – in a fake blood-drenched piece called Angel - and who later strode through the streets of Manhattan dressed in a muscly body suit made of meat, looking a little like Yukio Mishima on his way to an abbatoir.
Zhang’s delightfully absurd videotaped stunts have been conducted across the world : he has had doves peck sesame seeds from his honeyed skin in Hamburg, swung himself in a giant ball across a church square in Santiago de Campostella, lain on a bed of ice at PS 1 in Queens hoping to melt it with his body heat and – most famously of all in a piece called “Twelve Square Meters” – sat in a public latrine in Beijing covered with fish oil while filming millions of flies eating him. Art writers, always in search of “transgression” have loved every minute. Zhang’s code is a little simpler. “Being alive,” he writes, “is the most important. Life is the priority.” Elsewhere he notes more drily that, “I wanted to kill myself but not able to do so.”
In his own writings, in fact, Zhang’s cutting tone reminds one of Dali’s perpetual astonishment at the reactions of his own body to various phenomena of nature, observing himself with the laconic detachment of a doctor studying an interesting corpse. He is cool, scornful, curious and surprised as he ponders why his body cannot melt ice or why he feels anxiety when his face is painted over with Buddhist spells or is eaten alive by flies. Like Dali, he seems to be driven by a calculating but animal morbidity.
When I flew to Shangai to meet Zhang, therefore, I expected a petulant prima donna with a tiresome ego and a canny awareness of how easily Western tastes for modish exotica can be satisfied. China is in fashion across the board, and it has never been easier for Chinese artists to make a killing by branding themselves as iconoclasts. But I was wrong.
Although Zhang was a small, slender figure of modest intensity, dressed up in a kind of post-modern blue Mao cap and an Old Navy Athletics jacket, with only a hint of the designer clothes he apparently likes, it was immediately clear that he is more like the head of a large, sprawling production company that requires that constant, pragmatic attention. He has a hundred employees. Now that he has evolved beyond performance art, his work is increasingly communal in nature, turning out giant Buddha heads made of compacted ash gathered from Shanghai temples or photomurals mixed with traditional wood carving and projected onto huge antique doors salvaged from remote villages. “More Chinese,” he didn’t hesitate to say. And there is still a slightly awkward, shy element in him, a hint of the farmer’s son from Henan, the edgy outsider.
A tour of a western artist’s studio might take a couple of hours, but Zhang’s is more a miniature city than a studio. It lies in an industrial suburb called Ming Hang otherwise populated by textile factories and light manufacturing. There’s a company specializing in boat anchors down the street.
“I couldn’t afford anything like this in the West,” Zhang pointed out at once. “I came back to China from New York in 1999 precisely because I could do this sort of work in that city. I couldn’t employ a hundred Americans, nor even five. Here, land vales haven’t skyrocketed yet because the government still owns the land. And I also wanted to reconnect with China anyway – it’s a great time here, an explosive time. The West is sleeping, I think, but here we are awake round the clock. Twenty four hours.”
“That’s true of manufacturing,” I objected. “But art too?”
“Art too.”
Zhang’s Shanghai set-up more or less tries to prove the point. Each “factory” within this vast factory specializes in a different set of art works. In one, interns and students carefully applied hundreds of bird feathers to huge canvases designed to suggest Chinese divination books called Tui Bei Tu.; next door, inside the remains of a former Japanese garment workshop a group of village carvers from Dongyang set with their dozens of chisels pecking at slabs of timber to create fantastical freizes and shelves of three-dimensional heads inspired, one assumes, by both by Zhang’s nightmares and by Chinese folk lore : a one-legged pig, sows with human faces, birds pecking at cheeks, skulls and legs covered with beautifully carved flies, a human head with a mouse talking into its ear. Others carvers slaved over the aforementioned doors, copying pieces of a large photograph which showed a group of peasants building a thatch granary. It is obviously a world with which Zhang is intimately familiar : the unsung, long-oppressed Chinese countryside.
Although Zhang has left behind the antics which used his own body to alarming effect, the same primitive intensity which made those antics strangely gripping runs through this later work as well. Wandering through these hangers filled with folkish nightmares with their donkeys, flies and sundry mischievous animals, one feels very far from the usual conceits of contemporary art. Zhang claims to have felt the pull of a renewed interest in Buddhism. But one could also say that the Taoist view of nature and animals is also here present : the persuasion, for example, that the “best life” consists in refining to the utmost degree the virtues we share with animals.
“Animals are very important to me,” Zhang nodded. “As they are to Buddhism. But then I suppose I am already famous for my relationship with flies!”
Speaking of insects, there was an entire studio devoted to a series of monumental canvases upon which painters were laboriously inscribing various species of bug. Their ghostly images swirled through blocks of color that made them almost transparent, subtly evoking the unease that insects inspire in us. Elsewhere, a dead stuffed cow hung from a rafter with its head wrapped in a white cloth; monumental heads made of dozens of hides gave off the perfume of dead animals, and only after a moment’s shock did I notice that the faces were of giant nightmare babies.
Half way through my tour I was joined by the Hong Kong curator and documentary film-maker Christine Cui, as famous as Zhang in her own right in the Chinese art world and a luminary of NYU, which has just – a sign of the times - opened a branch in Shanghai. The footage would be used in Zhang’s upcoming huge show at the Shanghai Museum in February. We went into a hanger filled with epic monochrome paintings derived from historical photographs and painted with temple ash. I asked her how she had first met Zhang.
“Simple. I saw this Chinese guy in an Isse Miyake store and I went up to him and observed that he must be making a lot of money. It was Zhang. It must be the first generation of Chinese artists in history who drive SUV’s.”
Nearby was a curious picture of Hitler. I asked Zhang about this, because I wasn’t sure if Hitler resonated with the Chinese in the way he does with us, and he struck a slightly moody expression which included a smile.
“Ah, Shit-te-le,” he said. “Well, he was a historical personality.”
“That’s how we pronounce Hilter,” Christine explained. “Shit-te-le. He’s quite well known to the Chinese.”
“But why Shit-te-le?”
“Because,” Zhang said, “Shit-te-le changed history.”
And here we came to one of those odd misundertstandings that arise when one culture looks at another’s art. For us, a picture of Hitler painted in dried ash suggests the obvious crematoria; but when I made this observation, Chrtistine and Zhang seemed slightly surprised. Ash for them did not signify doom, genocide or death. On the contrary, this ash was derived from temples where people made hopeful wishes for the future. It was therefore auspicious. Ash might suggest death in some way, but not our way.
“Ash is a strange field,” Zhang said. “Especially this temple ash. No-one goes to a temple alone. It expresses a kind of togetherness. For me, ash renews the spirit of those who are dead. It gives them a second life.”
We clambered up a scaffolding suspended above the largest painting, which was laid horizontally on the ground. Painted in the same differing shades of ash, it was transcribed from a photograph of an irrigation project during the Mao years. Transposed from photograph to ash, the image became even more unbearable. Not because it showed any obvious atrocity but because it made the bee-hive collectivism of that era so suffocatingly obvious.
“What would you say?” Chrtsine asked me quietly when we were alone on the scaffold. “Is that a political work or not?”
“Of course,” I said. And I asked Zhang how the government censors worked these days. He shrugged.
“They leave me alone, really. A lot of my stuff now is about the environment and pollution. Ash, for example, is poured into lakes as rubbish. So I am making a statement simply by using it.”
The artist Ai Weiwei has said that the present epoch of Chinese art is rather like the movie “Home Alone”, where the parents are away but might come back at any moment. But Zhang points out that the art market itself is growing at the same pace as the country’s phenomenal growth in other areas; it’s therefore another expression of the country’s “awakening.” The implication is that the government would no more hamper it than they would the semiconductor industry.
Moreover, the art market is now highly integrated with the rising middle classes of a economy growing at 10 per cent a year. Real estate tycoons and entrepreneurs like Zhang Lau and Pearl Lam have become free-spending collectors and patrons just like their Western counterparts. And in fact, looking at Zhang’s painting of the irrigation project, I couldn’t help thinking of a series of five paintings by Liu Xiaodong called “The Three Gorges Project”, which recently sold for a cool $2.7 million and which portrays an environmentally disastrous dam project. As in the West, environmental protest, art and big money are not unlikely bed fellows.
“The difference,” Zhang adds, “is that in the West entrepreneurs and artists come from completely different backgrounds. They inhabit different worlds. But here, we all come from the same background. We share the same experiences, the same dreams. That’s unique to China.”
On the other hand, isn’t environmental folly an intrinsic part of the Chinese boom which never sleeps? It’s a terrifying problem that Zhang’s work only eludes to. Recently, as if in response to it, he has been traveling to Tibet, moved by its poverty and raw nature, its dark, complex Buddhism and its aloof simplicity. I also love Tibet, and we talked for a while about what that elusive place offers that few others do – especially to both Chinese and Western intellectuals who probably romanticize it in similar ways.
“Well, for one thing,” Zhang said with an impatient grin, “they leave their dead bodies in the open air to be eaten by birds. It’s almost the ultimate performance art. Maybe I’ll open my next studio there. I’m definitely thinking about it. Perhaps in the end one just want to live on top of a mountain and wait each day for the sunrise.”
