Zhang Huan

In May of 2007, Glimcher once again visited Zhang Huan, writing of the experience:

Getting off the plane in Shanghai, I’m excited to see what this magician has been up to since my last visit. At the height of his powers, Zhang is the conductor of a hundred-person orchestra of assistants, who sift and catalogue various colors of ash. He tells me it’s from incense that he’s been collecting from nearby Buddhist temples.

We walk through Zhang’s massive studio, stopping at an assistant’s workspace. Zhang picks up a pencil and makes changes to the image already sketched on the canvas. The assistant will roughly fill in the outlines with the ash before Zhang returns to finish the painting himself. It’s like a Renaissance master’s studio. “It’s perfectly normal for us, growing up in a communal society, to work together on projects,” he explains. “My art is a communal activity.”

Zhang tells me he has made me the gift of a new ash painting. I’m a little embarrassed, but very excited to see it. He shows me a block of compressed ash sitting on the floor, approximately one meter square wide and elevated about eight inches off the ground. An ash painting of flowers, lilies, and grasses rests atop the block. It is breathtakingly beautiful and delicate. I thank him profusely and we continue our tour of the studio. All the time, however, I am wondering: How will I move this painting? How do I take it home? There is no support. It’s just a pile of ash on the floor.

Before we sit down to a lunch of Dim Sum served in tin canteens, I ask Zhang if we can take another look at the painting he has made for me. I finally build up the courage to ask him, “How do I take this with me?” In response, Zhang smiles. He bends down on his knees and inhales deeply. With one great exhalation, he blows the painting away. “That’s how,” he says.

I realize this laboriously created painting existed only for me in that one ephemeral moment. I am touched to tears. I understand now more than ever how impermanence is the thread that weaves together all of Zhang Huan’s art.

It was in performance that Zhang first developed his practice, emerging in the mid-1990s as a central figure in the legendary Beijing East Village, a group of avant-garde artists redefining contemporary practice in China during that decade. Zhang’s provocative early work probed the limits of the body and its relationship to the environment. In 12 Square Meters (1994), he famously sat naked for hours in a public latrine, his skin covered in honey, allowing flies to cover his body. In To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain (1995), he and a group of friends lay naked in a pile atop the summit of a mountain on the outskirts of the city, temporarily “raising the height” of its peak. In To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond (1997), Zhang recruited a group of rural laborers to follow him into a pond in a poetic effort to collectively raise its water level by one meter.

After moving to New York City in 1998, Zhang’s performances began to address cultural adjustment and the immigrant identity. At MoMA PS1, he presented Pilgrimage—Wind and Water in New York (1998), a durational action in which he lay naked, face down in the museum’s courtyard, elevated on a traditional Chinese bed covered in blocks of ice and surrounded by tethered dogs. In My America (Hard to Acclimatize) (1999), dozens of participants threw stale bread at the artist from atop scaffolding, laying bare themes of assimilation and cultural disjuncture. For the 2002 Whitney Biennial, Zhang staged My New York, a performance in which he donned a suit made of raw meat and walked barefoot through the city handing out white doves. These works established Zhang as a crucial figure in the history of performance art and one of the most important Chinese contemporary artists of his time.

In 2006, Zhang relocated back to China, embraced Buddhism, and began working in sculpture and painting. To create his new works, he began collecting massive quantities of ash from Buddhist temples near his Shanghai studio—residues from incense burnt in prayer. Separating the ash by color and texture, Zhang developed a method for using the material as pigment, creating grisaille compositions that depict historical scenes from China’s past. The exhibition at 125 Newbury features a group of ash paintings presented together with works from the artist’s Memory Door series—low-relief carvings that combine sculptural and drawing elements. Both series were begun concurrently, and both deal with the transience of history and the role of memory in preserving and fixing the past.

Widely regarded as one of the most important living Chinese contemporary artists, Zhang’s work is held in numerous public collections internationally, including The Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, among many others. Zhang Huan: Performances and Related Works follows Ordinary Life, a 2025 exhibition of the artist’s ash paintings at the University of Kentucky Art Museum in Lexington.