The posthumous retrospective exhibition of the work of the artist Datong Dazhang at the Power Station of Art (PSA) in Shanghai adds to knowledge of the development of contemporary art in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), while projecting a highly questionable curatorial vision of the artist as a prophetic critic of China’s now increasingly globalised art world.
Datong Dazhang (née Zhang Shengquan) was born in 1955 in the city of Datong in the PRC. An unusually tall man at 1.9 metres, he was given the nickname Datong Dazhang (Big Zhang from Datong), which he later adopted as his artist’s name. Towards the end of his life a chronically impoverished Datong Dazhang displayed growing signs of psychological instability and premature physical deterioration. Datong Dazhang committed suicide sometime during new-year’s eve/day 2000 while much of the rest of world celebrated the turn of the new Millennium. He took his life within a small residential apartment, photographs of which show conditions of profoundly abject squalor.
From the early 1980s to his death Datong Dazhang sought to establish himself as a modern/contemporary artist outside official structures, first producing paintings, then conceptual works and performances. In 1987 he became a founding member of the WR Group (WR is an abbreviation of the pinyin wu ren, ‘five people’) that together staged a series of exhibitions in Datong and Beijing. Relatively few of the artworks produced by Datong Dazhang are still in existence and numerous artworks planned by him remained unrealised at the time of his death. The circumstances of Datong Dazhang’s life and death have resulted in a romanticised view of his legacy within the PRC. He has been described as ‘China’s van Gogh’... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
The Fear of Math. Reconstruction. Courtesy Power Station of Art, Shanghai. Photograph Jiang Wenyi.
Questioning the Weight of Scales. Reconstruction. Images courtesy Power Station of Art, Shanghai. Photographs Jiang Wenyi.
