Zhang Huan to Participate in Faena Festival

“Art has always been an inherently spiritual practice. Our rituals and ceremonies are indivisible from our contemporary creative output.” says Zoe Lukov, the chief curator of the second annual Faena Festival.

Titled The Last Supper, the 2019 edition of the festival will coincide with Art Basel Miami Beach, running from December 2-8 across multiple venues in Miami Beach. Bringing together a series of new commissions, installations, videos and performances that draw on religion, spirituality, food and ritual, the festival celebrates both iconic and contemporary platforms for connecting and congregating.

Among the works on view will be a new site-specific installation by Zhang Huan. Perhaps best known for time-intensive performances that test his own physical and mental endurance, Zhang Huan regularly explores the figure and symbolism of the Buddha. He often uses materials such as incense ash to investigate this subject, while simultaneously depicting his cultural history and his conflicted feelings towards it.

For The Last Supper, Zhang will present Miami Buddha. The work will feature two Buddhas sitting face to face—one an aluminum mold, the other made of incense ash imbued with the prayers of untold worshippers, collected from temples around China. During its installation on the beach, the ash Buddha will be exposed to the elements and may crumble and disintegrate – a meditation on the impermanence of life, the cyclicality of destruction and renewal, and the cycle of itinerant reincarnation death and rebirth.

For more information, please visit Faena Festival's (opens in a new window) website.