In a scant dozen years Zhang Huan has gone from performing in a communal latrine in Beijing, to peripatetic appearances at global art events while based in New York, to a return to China where, in a Shanghai factory complex, he now commands a staff of one hundred producing his work. ‘Altered States’, curated by Melissa Chiu, Director of the Asia Society’s Museum, was Zhang’s first museum retrospective and in tracing his short, remarkable career the exhibition also suggested several incomplete allegories of the body, avant-gardism, and the rise of China as a superpower.
Chiu’s selection of photographs, video documentation, paintings and sculptures was organised around the three metropolitan sites—Beijing-New York-Shanghai—where Zhang has lived, for each city in turn has fostered a different mode of working. Born in 1965 in Henan Province, Zhang moved to Beijing to study oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1991. Two years later he relocated to the city’s grotty edges where he established Beijing’s East Village (after the same in New York) as a place for fellow artists. Here, in poverty and with the constant possibility of harassment, he staged his earliest performances, among them the now famous 12 Square Meters (1994), where Zhang sat naked for an hour, covered in fish oil and honey, in a filthy public toilet, and 65 Kilograms (1994), in which the artist was suspended from his apartment ceiling while his blood dripped from cuts into a metal bowl below.
Zhang’s quote ‘The body is proof of identity’ is important to the exhibition but in these well-documented performances Zhang also invests the body-tested-in-endurance with the possibility of resistance. Five years after the physical resistance to the