VANCOUVER — If art is affected by the physical place where it’s created, the work of Zhang Huan may be the textbook example. With moves from Beijing to New York and then back to Shanghai, the artist’s career is divided into three distinct chapters. The progress can be traced in Zhang Huan: Altered States, his first major North American retrospective, now at the Vancouver Art Gallery (and organized by the Asia Society in New York, where it was debuted last year).
“There are certain constants in his work,” says Melissa Chiu, the Asia Society’s museum director, and the curator of this exhibition. “The body is a real frame of reference that grounds all of it. But his living circumstances really did change, certain elements of them, and you can see the transition [in his work].”
Zhang, 43, was born in Henan province and began studying at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1991. There, on the outskirts of town where the cost of living was low, he and other artists established what they called the Beijing East Village (named after New York’s East Village).
During this time, Zhang began developing the body-focused performance art that came to be his trademark. He pushed physical endurance to the limits, covering himself in honey and fish oil to attract flies and insects while he sat in a public latrine (12 Square Meters, 1994) and suspending himself from his studio’s ceiling while doctors drew blood from his body and had it drip onto a hot plate (65 Kilograms, 1994).
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