The China Project

135 Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection ZHANG Huan Zhang Huan is known for his performances of physical endurance and hardship, which both comment on societal issues and explore deeper relations with the self through the body. Zhang Huan’s performances of the 1990s were centred on his experience of living in Da Shan Village, Chaoyang district in north-east Beijing. To reflect the growth of this embryonic artists’ community, which also included Ma Liuming and Zhu Ming, the area was renamed ‘Beijing East Village’, in reference to New York’s infamous East Village. Among Zhang Huan’s most famous performances is 12 square meters , which took place in June 1994 in a typical public toilet. The title refers to its dimensions. Zhang Huan recounts the performance in spare and visceral terms: I sat upright and unsupported in the middle of the toilet for an hour. My body was covered with honey and fish juice, and before long, flies were all over my body, even my lips and eyes . . . In the course of the hour, I tried to forget myself and separate my mind from my flesh, but I was pulled back to reality again and again. Only after the performance did I understand what I experienced. An hour later, I walked out of the toilet and into a nearby pond that was polluted with garbage. I walked until water covered my head and hoards of flies struggled on the water to save their lives. 1 For Zhang Huan, this extreme experience highlighted the way in which ‘the very concept of life was then for me the simple experience of the body’. 2 The performance was also a critique of the abject conditions experienced by thousands of Chinese who were flocking to the city in the hope of a more prosperous future. In 1995, Zhang Huan organised and directed the collaborative performance To add one meter to an anonymous mountain — which took place in the Miaofengshan Mountain area — with the help of nine artists from Beijing East Village. Each participant was weighed, and then, with the heaviest person at the bottom, they formed a human pyramid on top of a mountain, their naked bodies stacked against one another. For To raise the water level in a fishpond 1997, Zhang Huan employed a similar concept by inviting around 40 migrants — who had recently come to Beijing to find work — to participate in the performance. These migrants, often known as the ‘floating population’, were construction workers, fishermen and labourers. In the performance, Zhang Huan and the participants waded into the Nanmofang fish pond in Beijing, displacing the water level with their body mass. In contrast to the inflammatory nature of much performance art in the 1980s, Zhang Huan’s performances in the following decade were often quiet and isolated. His stoic and meditative endurance of often extreme and abject situations is nevertheless reflective of everyday realities. Like 12 square meters, To raise the water level in a fishpond highlights the plight of the poorer echelons of society. In this work, high-rise buildings loom in the background near the edge of the pond, pointing to the expansion of both cities and populations, the shortage of natural resources, and the enforced migration facing the children of farm labourers. These works, as with all Zhang Huan’s performance works, explore the far-reaching effects of simple actions. endnotes 1 Zhang Huan, ‘A Piece of nothing’ in Melissa Chiu (ed.), Zhang Huan: Altered States [exhibition catalogue], Edizioni Charta, Milan, Italy and Asia Society, New York, 2007, pp.58–9. 2 Zhang Huan, quoted in Qian Zhijian, ‘Performing bodies: Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, and performance art in China’, Art Journal , vol.58, no.2, 1999, p.66. above To raise the water level in a fishpond (still) 1997 DVD, 6:19 minutes, colour, stereo, open edition / Purchased 2008. The Queensland Government’s Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund opposite 12 square meters (still) 1994 DVD, 3:02 minutes, colour, stereo, open edition / Purchased 2008. The Queensland Government’s Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund