On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century

Stripped Down

• • • Stripped Down Zhang Huan has always wanted to do large-scale pieces, but in China he had trouble getting people to take their clothes off. Nudity is essential to his work, he believes. Last November, he finally managed to stage such a performance at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, with himself and fifty-six other naked people. Of course, he had hoped for a hundred. One of China's foremost performance artists, Zhang began to attract attention in New York when he performed in 1998 at "Inside/Out," P.5.1'S landmark show on new Chinese art. In that piece, New York Feng Shui, he lay naked and face down on an ice mattress atop a traditional Chinese bed. Only in nakedness, Zhang says, can the body's "relationship with the spirit be identified through its direct contact with the object ." In other words, he needed to feel the ice against his skin. Zhang's work has all the rigor and risk of classic ordeal art, a style no longer fashionable here but right on time in late-'90S Beijing. There, in 12 Square Meters, he sat naked and unmoving in a public toilet for an hour, covered with honey and fish oil, and, inevitably, flies. In 65 Kg, he suspended himself with chains from the ceiling ofhis studio, naked, a needle inserted in his arm, blood dripping onto a hot plate for an hour. In The Original Sound, he lay naked under a highway overpass, then poured a bottle full of worms into his mouth and let them crawl out onto his body. In 25 mm Threading Steel, he went to a construction site and lay naked next to a huge saw as it chopped steel bars, spraying sparks over his body. The two pieces in which he managed to get collaborators in China were conceptual, involving no physical peril. In To Raise the Level ofa Fish Pond, he persuaded village laborers to stand chest-deep in a local pond. And in To Raise aMountain by One Meter, he got his artist friends to disrobe and pile on top of each other to create the meter. 342 FIN-DE-MILLENIUM Now Zhang lives in New York, but speaks little English. With the help of translator Mathieu Borysevicz, the artist explained to me that in Chinese tradition, nudity is perceived as a perversion. That's just one reason it interests him. More important is the fact that he sees the body as his material, his form, "the only direct way through which I come to know society and society comes to know me." In the Seattle piece, his work takes a new theatrical direction, and its original title hints at a new set of problems: Hard to Acclimatize. When people told him that the title "wasn't explanatory enough," he decided it must be better in Chinese and rechristened the piece, My America. Zhang says that until the '90S, no one in China pursued performance art as a form to work in fulltime. Vanguard art began to emerge there in the late '80S, with '89 a watershed year. That February, a "China/Avant Garde" show opened at the National Gallery-almost. Two artists fired gunshots into their installations during the opening, and officials immediately closed the exhibition. Then, in June, came the massacre at Tiananmen. Zhang moved to Beijing from Henan province in 1991, enrolling as a graduate student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He was a painter whose favorite Western artists were Rembrandt and Millet. Then, one day, he went into the library designated for teachers only and happened upon a catalog for the New York artist Tseng Kwong Chi, best know for his ironic self-portraits in which he posed himself in front of tourist attractions all over the world, dressed in a Mao suit and dark glasses. Zhang was baffled and stunned. A door opened in his mind. In 1992, he abandoned painting and moved with other hardy experimentalists to a suburb west of the city. They dubbed it "the East Village," having heard that there was an artists' neighborhood of that name in New York. Beijing-based art critic Karen Smith describes the ambience: "Many of the village'S indigenous population scrape a living by collecting and sorting rubbish. Waste accumulates by the side of small ponds. This pollutes the water, generating noxious fumes in the summer ..." Zhang confirms this, saying that basically they were living in a garbage dump. They wanted to...