Zhang Huan: Altered States - Hardcover

Chiu, Melissa; Bu, Kong; Heartney, Eleanor

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 888158641X ISBN 13: 9788881586417

Publisher: Charta / Asia Society, 2007

Synopsis

Zhang Huan (born in China in 1965 and currently living in Shanghai) may be best known for his first performance, which sparked the cancellation of the group show at which it was staged. Of that encounter with China's censorship machinery, he says, "They had me write a self-criticism and pay a fine for my 'misdeed,' promising that the exhibition would be reopened. I did what they said only for the sake of the show. But it was never opened." He continued exploring performance in private events--once testing the relationship between physical endurance and spiritual tranquility by covering himself with honey and lying in a squalid public toilet covered in flies--but he has never held another public performance in China. Zhang has been exploring cross-cultural life, and lately making introspective and even spiritual work, invoking the temporality of material existence by lying on a bed of ice surrounded by dogs at New York's P.S.1, for example. His critically acclaimed work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Saatchi Collection, the MacArthur Foundation and Yale University. Copublished with the Asia Society.

About this title

About the Author:

Interview: RoseLee Goldberg is an art historian, critic and curator who pioneered the study of performance art. Author of several seminal books, including Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (1979) and Performance: Live Art from the 1960s (1998), she is the Founding Director of 'Performa', a non-profit organization for the development, commission and presentation of performance art. Survey: Yilmaz Dziewior is a critic and curator based in Hamburg, where he is professor in art theory at the Hochschule fur bildende Kunste. Formerly Curator at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne and Director of the Kunstverein in Hamburg, where he organized an exhibition of Zhang Huan's work in 2002, he is currently Co-Curator of the 7th Biennial Exhibition of Visual Arts in Limerick (2009). His writing has been published in Artforum, Camera Austria and Texte zur Kunst, as well as in numerous exhibition catalogues. Focus: Robert Storr is Dean of the School of Art at Yale University. Formerly Senior Curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he directed the SITE Santa Fe Biennial in 2004 and the Venice Biennale in 2007. He was a contributing author to Phaidon's Alex Katz (2005), Louise Bourgeois (2003) and Raymond Pettibon (2001), and writes regularly for numerous journals and magazines, including Art in America, Frieze and Parkett.

About the Author:

Melissa Chiu is the Curator of Contemporary Art at The Asia Society in New York.

Vishakha Desai is the Director of the Museum & Cultural Programs at The Asia Society in New York.

About this edition

• Publisher: Charta / Asia Society
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 888158641X
• ISBN 13: 9788881586417
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 180