University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Prospering in resistance: the performance art of Zhang Huan from the 1990s to 2000s

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Prospering in resistance: the performance art of Zhang Huan from the 1990s to 2000s

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Content Yishun Li
Master of Curatorial Studies and the Public Sphere
Thesis Committee Chair: Karen Moss
Committee Members: Jenny Chio, and Meiling Cheng
Prospering in Resistance:
The Performance Art of Zhang Huan from the 1990s to 2000s
By
Yishun Li
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS (CURATORIAL PRACTICES AND THE
PUBLIC SPHERE)
May 2019
© Yishun Li
2

Table of Contents
The “System” and the Official Art since 1980s in China ................................................... 4
Rebelling Against the Official: Performance Art and the Power of Xianchang ................. 7
Questioning Modernity: Underground Resistance and Bodily Hysteria .......................... 12
Moving Forward: From Personal Experience to Social Critique...................................... 19
Deconstructing Cultural Binaries: Resistance in the “Third Space” ................................ 23
Interrogating Cultural Identity: Post-Orientalist Negotiation with the Art World ............ 29
Internalizing Violence: Body Art as a Spiritual Resistance to the Mundane World ......... 35
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 40
Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 48

3

“My principle of the art is that those who submit shall perish and those who resist will
prosper. Sword to cut our own heads until death.”
1

––Zhang Huan, 2010

The art of Zhang Huan’s highly theatrical performances and large-scale installations
strike the contemporary art world with the gene of resistance. Though most critics and scholars
primarily focus on the performativity, as well as cultural and religious references of Zhang’s
work, they often overlook the resistant spirit that is buried under the surface of his work. Born in
1965, Zhang’s work is closely related to and rises slightly after the “New Wave” art scenes in
China that developed in the early 1980s and later became known as the “85 New Wave.”
Although a graduate from the dogmatic Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, which
is widely questioned for its ability to teach creative arts, Zhang makes innovative use of various
media in his artwork to create a wide range of visual forms including performance, photographs,
ash paintings, sculptures, and installations. There is no doubt that he is a successful artist who
has been written into the Chinese history of art and has been featured in international exhibitions,
yet his artistic expressions consistently suggest a deeper meaning that transcends mere forms.
Through his visual forms, Zhang calls for a reckless, “break free from the system” approach,
which has stirred up controversy around him while bringing him artistic success.
2
This thesis
will investigate the various system, conditions, and binaries that Zhang tries to resist, and the
diverse angles and visual strategies he has taken and adopted in performance that best

1
Zhang Huan, “Zhang Huan: My Principle of the Art is ‘Those Who Submit Shall Perish, Those
Who Resist Will Prosper’,” Art World, no. 238, January and February 2010, 74
2
Ibid., 74
4

demonstrate his resistance.

The “System” and the Official Art since 1980s in China

The “system” that Zhang’s art and that of many other post-85 avant-garde artists
challenge has both political and social connotations. The “system” for these artists not only refers
to the communist party state system but also the official style of art during the 1980s. After
December 1978 and the devastating Cultural Revolution, China began its reform and opening up
(Gaigekaifang) in its economic system and relationships with the West.
3
The reform enabled a
greater degree of freedom, with people arguably expecting the arrival of new art forms and
expanded visual culture. However, to the Chinese art world, the reform was perceived merely as
a successful promotion of “a widely practiced official style of oil painting only slightly more
varied than the one required ten or fifteen years before.”
4
In other words, it was only a de facto
updated version of the previous socialist realism. At the early stage of the reform, paintings that
depicted violence from the Cultural Revolution gained popularity due to their high degree of
realism and technical finesse. Then as the reform progressed, new subjects became popular such
as ordinary citizens, peasants, minority people, and most importantly the migrant workers or

3
Barry Naughton, “Cities in the Chinese economic system: changing roles and conditions for
autonomy,” in Urban Spaces in Contemporary China: The Potential for Autonomy and
Community in Post-Mao China, ed. Deborah S Davis, et al. (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson
Center Press, 1995), 76.
4
Julia F. Andrews and Gao Minglu, “The avant-garde’s challenge to official art,” in Urban
Spaces in Contemporary China: The Potential for Autonomy and Community in Post-Mao
China, ed. Deborah S Davis, et al. (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1995),
221.
5

peasant laborers that were attracted to the urban areas because of the economic shifts.
Though the official realism that became popular in the 1980s depicted its subjects in a
less idealized way in comparison to its predecessor, it still had clear links to previous socialist
realism in both style and political connotations.
5
In addition to the official realism, the reinstated
college entrance examination after the Cultural Revolution also adopted realism as the official
test form, which Lily Chumley referred to as Art Test Realism (ATR). This ATR mainly
promoted a test genre called Sumiao which mostly portrayed delicately shaded, bust-length
portraits of work-weary faces.
6
Because of the official preference of workers as art subjects,
many training courses for the art examination used migrant and peasant laborers or retirees as
live models for their students.
As a rebellion against the official art and the political climate, Zhang and the New Wave
artists’ work differed from the mainstream realism in several significant ways. First, it had no
links to socialist realism and the art during the Cultural Revolution and was developed in
opposition to the official styles. To be specific, these artists defied the official art form of realism
by exploring other experimental forms, such as performance, non-realist painting, and art film.
Second, as part of their rebellion, Zhang and the avant-garde artists promoted creative freedom
and individual human freedom.
7
Moreover, the Chinese avant-garde artists were concerned with
issues such as social traumas, excess stress in life, and loss of traditional morals and beliefs

5
Ibid., 229-30.
6
Lily Chumley, Creativity Class: Art School and Culture Work in Postsocialist China
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 93.
7
Julia F. Andrews and Gao Minglu, “The avant-garde,” 234.
6

caused by the economic reform.
Wu Hung points out that China’s ambition was to accomplish a century of development
in the West in one or two decades.
8
This extremely compacted process of modernization resulted
in rapid commodification of virtually everything, including art. An ultra-fast-paced lifestyle was
also promoted for Chinese people. In contrast, Zhang always called for a slower pace for
contemporary life. At least until recently, Zhang and other avant-garde artists were unconcerned
with commercial trends and generally considered artistic values much over commercial values.
9

What makes Zhang so distinguished from his peer avant-garde performance artists is his ability
to present a sense of resistance through various visual languages. As he said in an interview: “My
essence never changes. The forms and languages change.” Zhang demonstrates his belief in the
resistance of performance no matter what visual languages he used to convey that.
10
Whether
Zhang’s rebellion is ultimately successful or not, it is worthwhile to examine his body of work in
order to understand how he expresses resistance through art. Moreover, his resistance seems to
lead to a deeper and further exploration and liberation of spiritual freedom and human
spirituality, in which, Zhang ultimately releases his impulse of resistance and achieved peace.

8
Wu Hung, “A Case of Being ‘Contemporary’: Conditions, Spheres, and Narratives of
Contemporary Chinese Art,” in Antinomies of Art and Culture Modernity, Postmodernity,
Contemporaneity, ed. Terry Smith, et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 304.
9
Julia F. Andrews and Gao Minglu, “The avant-garde,” 234.
10
Liu Jingjing, “Zhang Huan: Recklessness and Wisdom,” Art World, no. 215, February 2008,
57.
7

Rebelling Against the Official: Performance Art and the Power of Xianchang

Chinese artists began to adopt the performance art medium in the mid-1980s. Some
artists from self-organized, avant-garde groups such as the Three Step Studio in Shanxi province,
the Rhinoceros Painting Group in Shandong province, and the M Group in Shanghai created
performance pieces as part of their unofficial exhibitions.
11
The peak of Chinse performance art
came during February 1989 at the China/Avant-Garde exhibition that was held at the Chinese
National Art Gallery in Beijing. Several performance pieces even caused the Public Security
Bureau to twice intervene and close the exhibition. Despite these high-profile incidents,
performance art of the 1980s could only be considered as “a secondary by-product” of the avant-
garde artists of the time because of the fact that, there were no artists exclusively focusing on
performance art.
12

Performance first art came to China from the West in the early 1980s. The Chinese term
for performance art is “Xingwei Yishu,” which roughly translates as “Behavioral Art” in English.
Gao Minglu points out that the word “behavior” has quite a different meaning than the original
sense of performance and the concept of “behavior” is not only limited to the physical actions of
the individual performer but also encompasses the moral sense of the individual expressing
himself or herself within a community or within a social structure.
13
This point relates to the

11
Gao Minglu, “Private Experience and Public Happenings, the Performance Art of Zhang Huan,”
in Zhang Huan, ed. Zhang Huan et al. (Barcelona, Spain: Cotthem Gallery, 2001) accessed
December 2017, http://www.zhanghuan.com/wzMF/info_74.aspx?itemid=1141.
12
Ibid.
13
Gao Minglu, “Private Experience.”
8

Chinese philosophical traditions and most directly to Confucianism. Chinese Confucian tradition
is in part distinguished by its placement of relationships at the center of a well-lived life.
14
To
Confucianism, such things as purely individual behaviors do not exist. All personal behavior is
social, and all behavior reflects some types of social relationship and ethics. This traditional
concept granted the Chinese performance art scene social significance that strengthened its status
as a resistance to the official styles. Since performance art has always had such a strong ability to
emotionally move an audience through its unconventional form, it has never been permitted in
China.
15
However, this type of taboo secured its leading status as a rebellious art form and has
effectively encouraged artists to choose the performance art medium to express their resistance
and social critiques. Ironically, this has also allowed Zhang Huan’s work more opportunity of
being noticed. Thus, Zhang’s devotion to such a socially engaging art posed a huge challenge to
the official art formally.
Unlike Gao Minglu who has linked performance to social behavior, performance art
theorist, Meiling Cheng examines performance art through its liveness and therefore, draws
similarities and connections to “live art” (Xianchang Yishu). Based on RoseLee Goldberg’s
critical work on performance art, “live art” and “performance art” are often interchangeable in
performance scholarship, Cheng regards the “live” (Xianchang) in live art as a condition of
production.
16
In both performance art and live art, the processes of making art and presenting art

14
“Chinese Ethics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Last modified September 14, 2018,
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-chinese/.
15
Gao Minglu, “Private Experience.”
16
Cheng Meiling, Beijing Xingwei: Contemporary Chinese Time-Based Art. (Lindon: Seagull
Books, 2013), 22-23.
9

overlap and build to the liveness of art. The shared conceptual kinship is evident between those
two artistic modes of performance art and live art. The connotation of Xianchang (the present
site) affiliates live art in its Chinese rendition to what Cheng has summarized as “the immediate,
the immersive and the interactive qualities of a live art event, one engaging an onsite audience”
from Adrian Heathfield’s 2004 book, Live: Art and Performance.
17
This notion of Xianchang is
often used by Zhang in his later performance works as a strategy to create a sense of violence,
disturbance, and resistance.
It was not until the 1990s that performance art became a specialized form that many
artists, including Zhang Huan, devoted to. Zhang has been widely recognized as one of the
earliest and most influential artist to focus on performance art since the early 1990s. Between
1992 and 1994, including Zhang, a group of struggling artists and musicians moved in the
dilapidated and polluted region which was originally called Big Mountain Village
(Dashanzhuang) on the fringes of Beijing because of the low-rents and close proximity to
downtown Beijing.
18
Later, Dashanzhuang became a hotbed of performance art, as artists began
to congregate in the village and initiated a large number of projects and performances.
Dashanzhuang was renamed as East Village (Dongcun) by its artists residents for its location on
the eastern outskirts of Beijing to evoke its Manhattan namesake.
19
After it was renamed, East
Village attracted many young migrant artists from provinces as they flocked into the big cities to

17
Ibid., 23.
18
Wu Hung, Rong Rong’s East Village, 1993-1998. (New York, NY: Chambers Fine Art, 2003),
9.
19
Cheng Meiling, Beijing Xingwei, 36.
10

form a new artistic movement. The place soon became a dynamic artist community known for its
pushback against the official aesthetic status quo. Some of these artists further formed an avant-
garde inner circle, which included Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, Rong Rong etc., and began to
produce a series of highly challenging works - mainly performances and photographs - which
according to Wu Hung, generated an instant shockwave throughout the community of
experimental Chinese artists in Beijing and beyond.
20
Subsequently, East Village came to be
widely recognized as the base for the rebellious avant-garde art movement. After moving to this
community, Zhang performed three of his most well-known early pieces, Angel (1993), 65
Kilograms (1994), and 12 Square Meters (1994).
Zhang’s first public debut as a performance artist took place in October 1993. As part of
his installation piece titled Angel (Figure 1), a closet of piled up toy dolls, Zhang smashed a jar
filled with red food pigment and a dismembered toy doll in the west side courtyard of the
National Art Museum of China in Beijing. He then tied up the reassembled baby doll in the
gallery. In the end, Zhang’s body and the reassembled toy baby doll were both splattered with
red paint. This sort of “bloody” art spectacle is obviously a bold and rebellious statement against
the official aesthetic of realist paintings. Moreover, through its social significance that implied a
previous political incident, this piece resists the system. Zhang’s performance might remind
some people of the tragedy on June 4th, 1989 at the Tiananmen Square (Tiananmen Incident or
more generally referred as the 1989 Democracy Movement) and the anti-bourgeois liberalism

20
Ibid., 9
11

campaigns from 1990 to 1992. Since these incidents had just occurred recently, the baby doll
covered in “fresh blood” might also have been associated by some with the “Red Youth
Pioneers” of Communism.
21
Lastly, Meiling Cheng’s notion of liveness (Xianchang) added to
Angel’s resistant spirit. Since the artwork was created during its sharing process with a
witnessing entity other than the artist himself, the work could more directly and deeply engage
with its audience and thus, amplified its sense of resistance through this engagement. In fact, the
notion of Xianchang itself is deeply resistant because of its own complicated history.
Zhang’s play with Xianchang could also be related to another movement in China from
the early 1990s, which was the New Documentary Movement.
22
Xianchang is also a film term
for the shooting location and was adopted as a filmic practice by many pioneer filmmakers
including Wu Wenguang. Luke Robinson argues that the New Documentary Movement in China
sought to signify the notion of Xianchang, films shot - “on the scene,” differentiating these new
documentaries from the officially sanctioned, studio-based film format of the 1980s and
embracing unexpectedness.
23
Therefore, the practice of Xianchang in these new films marked a
break with the official realism. Moreover, to be distinguished from the official film style, new
documentaries that adopted the aesthetic of Xianchang were often interested in revealing
individual traumas and broader violence. For example, J.P. Sniadecki points out that social

21
Gao Minglu, “Private Experience.”
22
Chris Berry and Lisa Rofel, Introduction to The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement:
for the Public Record, ed. Chris Berry et al. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 4.
23
Luke Robinson, “From ‘Public’ to ‘Private’: Chinese Documentary and the Logic of Xianchang,”
in The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: for the Public Record, ed. Chris Berry et al.
(Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 180.
12

suffering and violence play a major role in shaping the filmmaker’s relation to the world and
direct his or her image-making.
24

In Angel, Zhang’s performance clearly borrowed both the concept and the common
practices from Xianchang. The time-based quality of his performance had already created the
sense of being “on the scene” for its audience. His sudden and unexpected actions such as
smashing the jar and splashing the pigment also exhibited the uncontrollable spontaneity and
social disturbance that is encouraged by the social potential of Xianchang. Through both its form
and content, this first performance piece by Zhang should be regarded as a bold resistance to the
official art and political system. It shared a similar violent sensibility with the films from the
New Documentary Movement and built an atmosphere of a social intervention. As a result of the
rebellious implications of this piece, Zhang was fined by the National Art Museum and forced to
write a self-criticism piece.
25

Questioning Modernity: Underground Resistance and Bodily Hysteria

After his first debut performance which caused a huge scene and ended up with a fine,
Zhang began to work underground in East Village because he thought the audience in China did
not fully understand him: some people criticized his work, questioning if it was art.
26
However,

24
J.P. Sniadecki, “The Cruelty of the Social Xianchang, Intersubjectivity, and Interobjectivity,” in
DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film, ed. Zhang
Zhen et al. (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2015), 60.
25
Gao Minglu, “Private Experience.”
26
Mary Jane Jacob, “Zhang Huan,” in Buddha mind in contemporary art, ed. Jacquelynn Baas
13

more importantly, Zhang was facing more pressure from the system that he resisted because the
government began to realize the danger and social significance of such experimental art. Since
the social content is always present regardless of whether or not an individual artist consciously
attempts to address these issues in his or her specific works, performance artists were labeled as
a threat to the socialist ideology. Unlike traditional art forms, such as painting and sculpture,
which require some audience sophistication, performance art delivers its complexity to the
audience through a much more direct and comprehensible way through its use of the human
body.
27
For the above reasons, performance art has been regarded by Chinese officials and
conservatives as a form of dangerous social subversion to the socialist order. Because of the
increasing pressure, Zhang had to maintain a low profile to continue his performance art, and he
had to resist underground in Beijing’s East Village.
In 1994, Zhang performed two of his most well-known early pieces, 12 Square Meters,
and 65 Kilograms. 12 Square Meters (Figure 2), which Zhang performed in May 1994 has
become a classic piece in the history of Chinese performance art. In this work, Zhang covered his
body with a mixture of visceral liquid of fish and honey and sat naked in a filthy public toilet in
East Village for an hour until he was totally covered with hundreds of flies. According to the
artist, this performance was not meant to create a big scene. Rather, Zhang invited only a dozen
artists friends who lived in the village to help take photo and video documentations and the only

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 243.
27
Gao Minglu, “Private Experience.”
14

other viewer was a villager who came to use the restroom.
28
Since the 12 Square Meters
performance was in so low profile, most audience experience this piece through photographs.
Zhang was clearly using other representational strategies instead of just Xianchang to
demonstrate the social significance of this performance. For Zhang, performing this piece was an
extreme body experience to forget about everything in his life and only to engage with his body,
spirit, and the environment around him. In 12 Square Meters and other performances that he did
from 1994 to 1996, Zhang effectively pushed the limits of his body as he seemed to explore the
concept of hysteria in order to continue his resistance against the “system” and the other issues in
post-modern China after the economic reform.
Hysteria is a term that has its roots in Western classical culture and is most often
associated with Sigmund Freud’s psycho-analysis. Katie Hill points out that the Freudian
discourse on hysteria developed through his case studies laid the foundation for the modern
psycho-analysis in the twentieth century. Freud was a key figure among the many sources of
modern psychology thought taken up by Chinese intellectuals in the 1980s.
29
In an interview,
Zhang described his experience:

I just felt that everything began to vanish from my sight. Life seemed to be leaving me far
in the distance. I had no concrete thought except that my mind was completely empty. I
could only feel my body, more and more flies landing and crawling over my nose, eyes,
lips, ears, forehead, every part of me. I could feel them eating the liquid on my body.
Some were stuck but did not stop eating. I could even tell that they were more interested

28
Qian Zhijian, “Performing Bodies: Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, and Performance Art in China,”
Art Journal 58, no. 2 (June 1, 1999), 66.
29
Katie Hill, “Why the Manic Grin? Hysterical Bodies: Contemporary Art as (Male) Trauma in
Post-Cultural Revolution China,” in Burden or Legacy from the Chinese Cultural Revolution to
Contemporary Art, ed. Jiang Jiehong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007), 77.
15

in the fish liquid than the honey because there were more flies on the left part of my
body, where that liquid was. The very concept of life was then for me the simple
experience of the body.
30

From the vivid description of his bodily experience during the performance, it seems
probable that Zhang underwent extreme discomfort both physically and psychologically. This
radical way that Zhang engaged with the environment through his own body is associated with
what Hill has called “Hysterical Bodies.”
31
In 12 Square Meters, Zhang utilized his hysterical
body as a form of resistance to challenge the 1990s everyday life in China that was experiencing
rapid social and environmental changes generated by the intensive process of modernization. In
this performance he associates the idea of the body in a filthy, garbage polluted, and fly-ridden
environment to everyday village life on the edge of a modern city.
The social significance of 12 Square Meters is as salient as that of Angel, but it was
manifested through different means. In this performance, there was a rising sense of self-
consciousness and deliberate alienation from modernity, which was conveyed through a single
naked body, trapped in a filthy and polluted environment on the edge of a city, which was
inhabited by flies that literally fed off the liquids on his skin. Although Zhang avoided creating a
scene highly charged by political implications, in the photo documentations, his body appears to
be both “sexualized and politicized,” portraying a masculinist display of muscle-power that adds
an impressive aura to its sense of resistance.
32
A close-up side view of the artist captures in the
image his shaven head as well as his skin glittering with the liquid of honey and fish substances.

30
Qian Zhijian, “Performing Bodies,” 65-66.
31
Katie Hill, “Why,” 71.
32
Ibid., 81.
16

Though the performance was less associated with the concept of Xianchang, the images of
Zhang sitting naked in a public toilet with flies on his skin created a strong sense of the aesthetics
of Xianchang. 12 Square Meters was not only about the impact of the environment on the body,
but also about Zhang’s understanding of his own lived experience of and relationship to the
society. According to Hill’s interpretation, the images of this performance could even be seen as
a self-portrait of the artist caught in a moment between “modernity” and “post-modernity,” as the
alienated figure with his shiny muscle-bound body has a monumental feel of existential angst of
modernity, and yet, this image is an icon of what could be termed as “post-modern” China.
33

Zhang used his body and the filthy environment of a public toilet as a metaphor to elicit his
social criticism that people of post-modern China were surrounded and poisoned by a repressive
regime, polluted environment, and overly fast-paced modernization which caused people to
value nothing but money. Though much more contained than the dramatic Angel, 12 Square
Meters could be seen as a silent or underground protest against the official art, the people who
mocked him, and the sociopolitical situations of China in the 1990s.
Two months after his performance of 12 Square Meters in July 1994, Zhang did his
performance: 65 Kilograms (Figure 3). In this work, Zhang’s naked body was bound to a
horizontal iron bar on the roof with ten iron chains, and he was facing the ground from three
meters above. Two layers of white quilts and an iron pan were placed on the floor. A doctor drew
from his body 250 milliliters of blood which slowly flew through a plastic tube and dripped onto

33
Ibid., 81.
17

the iron plate heated by an electric stove. His blood and sweat immediately burned and the room
slowly filled with the increasingly pungent smell from that burning.
34
Similar to 12 Square
Meters, 65 Kilograms rebelled against the system through Zhang’s hysterical performance. In
this piece, Zhang wanted to specifically address the cruelty of the life in post-modern China. To
demonstrate this cruelty, Zhang again adopted the strategy of liveness as Xianchang, yet he
managed to balance dramatic level of this performance between the high-profile Angel and the
almost unnoticed 12 Square Meters by only inviting up to twenty spectators.
35
Once the
audience, comprised of mostly artists from East Village, stepped into the room of the
performance and onto the quilt, they immediately became a part of Zhang’s cruel scene: they had
nowhere to escape in the room, just as they had no way to escape from the cruel reality of life.
The irritating smell of the Zhang’s blood and sweat added to the liveness of the performance and
reinforced audiences’ realization of the truthfulness of the cruelty they were witnessing and
experiencing. In an interview, Zhang described his feeling while being hung in the air:
When I looked down onto the audience from where I was hung, I felt as if they were just
as bound as I was. They, too, had nowhere to escape. However, scared they were, they
couldn't leave. They seemed paralyzed by the fear and by their stronger desire to look.
Some of them even fainted when they saw the blood. But they didn't leave. Some
peasants from the neighborhood stood watching behind the windows. I am sure they were
really scared. But at the same time, they seemed to be eager to know what was going on
inside.
36

From his own words, it is evident that Xianchang, though on a much smaller scale here than in
Angel, was highly effective and his hysterical body created a powerful scene for his audience.

34
Qian Zhijian, “Performing Bodies,” 67.
35
Katie Hill, “Why,” 81.
36
Qian Zhijian, “Performing Bodies,” 67.
18

Because of the hanging, Zhang’s body quickly went stiff and this self-abusing performance
lasted for an hour and a half. Although overwhelmed by extreme pain, powerful outside forces,
and lack of mobility, Zhang wanted to demonstrate the endurance of human spirit through this
work.
there are multiple ways to interpret 65 Kilograms and its social significance. One possible
interpretation of this piece is to read it as a metaphor for Chinese people living under the
authority of the communist party. Rebellious people were often repressed and even persecuted by
the powerful state just as the body of Zhang was relegated to powerless flesh by chains at the
hands of others.
37
He used the blood dripping and burning scene as an implication of the
communist party’s brutal and violent suppression of the student march on June 4, 1989, which
was not too long before 1994. However, it was impossible to completely suppress people’s free
will. Zhang’s performance was not only a part of the underground art movement in the 1990s,
but also an elegy to the sacrifice on his and other people’s path of resistance. In general, Zhang’s
65 Kilograms and 12 Square Meters combines personal experience with a social critique, which
are two essential elements of his performance art.
38
Therefore, they make a compelling case for
bodily hysteria as a form of resistance.

37
Katie Hill, “Why,” 82.
38
Wu Hung, Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century
(Chicago: The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art The University of Chicago, 1999), 107.
19

Moving Forward: From Personal Experience to Social Critique

Three years later, while still living in East Village, Zhang invited forty-six migrant
laborers from all over the country, who worked in Beijing to create a group performance with
him called To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond (1997) (Figure 4). Among those migrant
workers, there were construction workers, movers, and farmers, ranging in age from five to sixty
years old. To begin this piece, Zhang first found a fish pond near Beijing’s South Third Ring
Road as the site for this epic performance. Then, he executed the performance with three
subsequent parts: “first, everyone surrounded and stared attentively at the fishpond of
approximately 200 meters in diameter. Then, each individual moved forward from his position to
the center of the pond, forming a human wall dividing the pond in two. Finally, they naturally
split apart, facing forward to watch as Zhang carried the owner of the fishpond’s five-year-old
son atop his shoulders into the water and walked toward the center of the group.”
39
They
literally raised the level of the water in the pond. Photographers and videographers documented
the performance and they made a six-minute color video with Zhang. In this piece, Zhang was
clearly using performance art to challenge the A TR. He accomplished this by incorporating forty-
six rural migrant workers, which were the major subjects of then ATR paintings.
Rural migrant workers are commonly referred to as “Nongmingong” in Chinese and this
expression, when translated in English, literally means “peasant worker.” The term can be

39
Bu Kong, “Zhang Huan in Beijing,” in Zhang Huan: Altered States, ed. Zhang Huan, et al.
(New Y ork: Asia Society, 2007) accessed December 2017,
http://www.zhanghuan.com/wzMF/info_74.aspx?itemid=1144.
20

generally applied to anyone of rural residential status that has left the countryside to work in
cities or suburban areas.
40
The Nongmingong as a visual subject is most commonly mediated
through two major mediums in China: official art, and television programs. ATR as a subset of
official art frequently depicts migrant workers, especially young children of migrant works and
elder males, because they are cheap to hire and thus seem to be the most economical source for
models. According to the fieldwork conducted by Lily Chumley in China, none of the art classes
she visited hired the many beautiful students of theater and dance schools as models, even
though these schools are frequently located close to art schools and test preparation institutions.
41

In fact, those beautiful student models are not so expensive that these art schools and institutions
cannot afford them. Thus, the monetary consideration fails to fully explain ATR’s preference for
migrant workers: there is clearly an aesthetic that guides the selection of these models. The
reason that these people are chosen as models is influence by both depictions of laborers in the
previous socialist realism and official contemporary Chinese visual cultures. Following that
logic, test preparation classes usually hire a migrant worker as the model for students to produce
bust-length realist portraits of the worker in charcoal as Sumiao. The definitive characteristic of
these portraits (Sumiao) is that they all depict a worker’s face, in an empty expression that might
appear to be resigned or stoic.
42
Therefore, the passive image of Nongmingong is mediated
through these portraits produced by art students.

40
Sun Wanning, Subaltern China: Rural Migrants, Media, and Cultural Practices. (Lanham,
Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 12.
41
Lily Chumley, Creativity Class, 96.
42
Ibid., 96.
21

The other major mediation for the image of Nongmingong is through national broadcast
television programs. The mainstream media often refers to rural migrant workers as the
constructors of China’s modernization, portraying them as the “strong and powerful master of
the nation.”
43
For political need, major media usually presents peasant laborers as both included
and also recognized by the modern discourse. In reality, however, because migrant workers all
bear this notion of the rural and the subaltern, residents in cities often regard them as the bottom
of the society, inferior and uneducated. This conflict between migrant laborers and urban
residents has become an enduring issue in China’s post-modern society, in which the subaltern
continues to struggle the unpleasant social conditions.
Building on that social tension, Zhang’s To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond is both a
visceral reminder of the actual situations of migrant workers and a bold rebellion against the
monotonous portraits produced by official art. In this performance, Zhang no longer engaged
with bodily hysteria as he did in previous pieces. Instead, he employed the aesthetic of
Nongmingong as subjects, but mocked the ways that they are supposed to be represented in
mainstream media and ATR. In photos of the performance, expressionless faces of peasant
workers and the artists are a ruthless critique to the official art. Moreover, Zhang moved beyond
his own bodily experience to an experience shared by others, which in this case was the migrant
laborers. In Zhang’s performance, the body is constantly in conflict with the environment. He
thought such a conflict is not necessarily an entirely personal problem because he believed it had

43
Sun Wanning, Subaltern China, 14.
22

been a common phenomenon and based on that thought, he invited migrant workers to
participate in the creation of this piece.
44
Similar to what he had done in 12 Square Meters and
65 Kilograms, Zhang utilized the bodily conflict as a metaphor, which demonstrated the
relationship between the society of post-modern China, and peasant laborers who were
marginalized by it and its urban elites. Though not a worker, as a migrant artist from Henan
province himself, Zhang shared this sense of being marginalized with those migrant laborers and
this shared emotion pushed him to create To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond.
The social significance of this piece, from a critical standpoint, is about the
marginalization of migrant workers and Zhang brought “voice and weight” to this marginalized
group.
45
Modernization of the urban areas brings huge flows of migrant laborers to cities such as
Beijing in search of a better life. It is such an irony that the cities built by these workers pay them
with low wages and then, humiliate and marginalize them as outsiders. Moreover, by carrying
the child of a migrant on his shoulder, Zhang also addressed the serious “second generation
problems” facing peasant laborers since they were mostly excluded from the social resources in
cities.
46
Zhang and the migrant workers used their own physical body to raise the water level in
the fish pond, though such a rise was negligible. However, in this action the symbolic meaning of
resistance was more important. Forty-six people might not be able to make a significant change,
but four thousand people could. The crucial and exclusive point about To Raise the Water Level
in a Fishpond is that this performance is not just an expression of unpalatable personal emotion.

44
Qian Zhijian, “Performing Bodies,” 70.
45
Benjamin Genocchio, “Paradise Regained.” Life Magazine, no. 52, March 2010, 187.
46
Gao Minglu, “Private Experience.”
23

Rather, it is not only a statement to the system that marginalizes peasant workers and produces
stereotypical images of them, but also a message to underprivileged people to unite and fight
back. Therefore, this piece was more politically charged than any other piece Zhang had created
at that time.
One year later, the Chinese contemporary art exhibition titled “Inside/Out: New Chinese
Art” (1998) was curated by Gao Minglu in New York in September. Before this exhibition,
various shows of Chinese contemporary arts had been made in several other Western countries.
Gao is a controversial art critic and curator in China’s art world. He went to the U.S. after
curating the 1989 China Avant-garde exhibition, which aroused many political issues. Gao called
and visited many artists in Beijing before heading for New York, including Zhang Huan. He
asked Zhang whether he would like to have the photos of To Raise the Water Level in a Fish
Pond as the poster of the exhibition and cover of the catalogue. Zhang agreed without hesitation
and in the same year, Zhang sold all his belongings in China and departed for New York alone.
47

Deconstructing Cultural Binaries: Resistance in the “Third Space”

Moving to the United States marked a courageous step forward for Zhang and his eight
years in the U.S. was a period that he pushed the boundary of culture, identity, and art using his
body and performance. Although Zhang originally intended to make some money and return to

47
Shen Y u, “Zhang Huan: After Nirvana, a New Life Begins,” in Magic Paradise: I Do | Huan
Art Life Space, ed. Mi Qiu (Beijing, China: BPG Artmedia Co., Ltd., 2015), 30.
24

Beijing when he first came to the U.S., this country turned out to bring him to a much larger
stage and this is where he truly gained his international fame.
48
However, his moving was not
quite easy because he was constantly confronted with issues of cultural difference and had to
quickly get familiar with a foreign language. After arriving in the West, the original antagonism
toward the “system” and the revolutionary attitude of Zhang and other 1980s Chinese avant-
garde artists were gradually softened.
49
At the same time, they encountered new challenges from
the mainstream Western culture which bears a lot of dualities in cultural reading. Such
confrontations pushed him to question individual identity as well as relationship to the
surrounding environments and expand his strategy to incorporate not only resistance but also
negotiation in post-orientalist ways, making him an artist who no longer belongs to any
particular culture but wanders in what Gao Minglu has called, the “third space.”
50

The term, “third space” is not an invention by Gao but rather, he extends the dimension
of the third space to encompass the references of Chinese overseas artists from the original
capitalized “Third Space.” It was proposed by Homi K. Bhabha in 1994 to describe a textual
space of cultural communication and perception that can lead to a possible hybridity of culture.
Bhabha problematizes the binary system, of reading and perceiving culture in isolation, as either
past or present, tradition or modernity, which has long been adopted by the Western scholars, by

48
Ibid., 33.
49
Gao Minglu, “Toward a Transnational Modernity: An Overview of Inside Out: New Chinese
Art,” in Inside Out: New Chinese Art, ed. Gao Minglu (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1998), 33.
50
Ibid., 19.
25

referring to this “enunciation of cultural difference.”
51
He argues that a cultural text or
referential system of meaning is quite insufficient for one culture to fully enunciate itself to
another on a linguistic level, therefore, creating misperceptions in communication. The
production of meaning must go through a neutral and unconscious “Third Space” to ensure the
interpretation of the meaning is not didactic but ambivalent.
52
This ambivalent process of textual
culture enunciation inspired Gao Minglu to bring Zhang and other Chinese overseas artists into
the discussion and show their significance because these artists are not only lively examples of
this perceptional ambivalence but also counter examples of what Samuel Huntington proposed,
“cultural heterogeneity” In 1993. Huntington’s theory argues that all cultures are distinct and
function at different levels of cultural heterogeneity which originates from the binary logic of
seeing culture, predicting that future world conflicts will happen between different civilizations
instead of nation states.
53
As Bhabha constantly rejects the binary readings of culture as either
original or foreign, his theory of Third Space and hybridity can be interpreted as an argument
against Huntington’s heterogeneous cultural clash which draws distinctions between cultures.
Therefore, it is particularly interesting to reexamine Zhang and other Chinese overseas
artists and their works, because they are right on the frontier of this crash of cultures. These
artists’ works produced meanings that were often subject to the cultural binaries and were
rendered as a product of a particular diaspora, in this case, the Chinese diaspora subjugated by

51
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 35.
52
Ibid., 36.
53
Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer, 1993):
22-24.
26

the culture of dominant Western liberal democracy. However, rather than being part of a
“diaspora,” which suggests cultural distinctions, these Chinese artists, as argued by Gao, may be
shaped Bhabha’s Third Space and may also be shaping a general “third space” that hybridizes the
East and the West.
54
Therefore, Zhang’s identity and works were caught right in the moment of
this intervention of cultural third space and they can be argued as his resistance to the binary
system of assigning meanings to culture as well as art. The meanings of his series of performance
in the U.S., thus could be translated alternatively through the ambivalence of the third space.
Zhang staged his first performance in the courtyard of the MoMA P.S.1 in New York.
Titled Pilgrimage - Wind and Water in New York (1998) (Figure 5), Zhang’s first solo
performance attracted a large and young audience.
55
Even from the title of the piece, the
audience can sense that Zhang was making some references to some cultural attributes, such as,
“wind and water (Fengshui or Geomancy)” that signify his own cultural background. While
people who share the same idea with Huntington would render Pilgrimage as a performance that
signifies the cultural distinctions or even exoticism, it is more productive to read the title through
Bhabha’s Third Space since the language of the title is a kind of cultural enunciation. Dropping
off the cultural binaries, an ambivalent production of meaning through third space would render
this tile as a cultural hybridity of various kinds of culture which could possibly include Christian,
Chinese, and American. To be more specific, pilgrimage is deeply associated with various
religion, and to Christians, it often means taking trips to particular churches, basilicas, cathedrals,

54
Gao Minglu, “Toward a Transnational Modernity,” 19.
55
Lin Xiaoping, “Part 1. Re-Creating Urban Space in Avant-Garde Art,” in Children of Marx
and Coca-Cola (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2017), 82.
27

and the Holy Land, Jerusalem. Wind-and-water (Fengshui) includes ancient geomantic principles
that have been used extensively by Chinese people through all times and people began to apply
these principles to the siting of cities as early as the third or fourth century.
56
Lastly, as a city of
intentional influence, New York has always been a shining symbol of the so-called American
culture.
Furthermore, when putting American culture through the Third Space of enunciation, it
becomes even more obvious that American culture is a hybridity of various kinds of traditions,
values, and religion. For people with different backgrounds, these meanings of this title can be
further appropriated to fit their understandings. As discussed, Zhang’s performance has
manifested itself as a hybrid of at least three different culture and demonstrates that the Third
Space of enunciation is an intervention that challenges the senses of the “historical identity of
culture” as a “homogenizing” and “unifying force” authenticated by national traditions.
57
The
title of seven words has already challenged the binary division of culture and the performance
itself will further complicate the situation.
During the performance, Zhang first sat naked on a bed in the furniture style of the
Chinese Ming dynasty and was surrounded by a pack of dogs, leashed to the bed with many
other audiences watching him, including the dog owners. In the next step of the performance, a
“mattress” made of several ice blocks was placed on the bed and he then lay face down on this

56
Ole Bruun, “The Fengshui Resurgence in China: Conflicting Cosmologies Between State and
Peasantry,” The China Journal, no. 36 (July 1996): 48, doi:10.2307/2950372.
57
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 37.
28

ice mattress for more than ten minutes.
58
He used various cultural attributes to demonstrate the
contrast and contradiction in his performance setting. Parsing out the key elements and putting
them through the third space of reading will help to better explain artist’s intention. The warm
wooden Chinese-style bed could be interpreted as Zhang’s cultural roots. The freezing ice
“mattress” that was imposed upon the bed probably suggests, as argued by Lin Xiaoping, the
different culture that Zhang had been experiencing, as a mattress is something that is
“Western.”
59

However, the icy mattress is where the interpretation of meaning gets complicated.
People who are familiar with Chinese classic literature would argue that Zhang’s performance of
lying on the ice made references to the famous Chinese fable “Lie on Ice for Craps”
(Wobingqiuli), which depicts self-inflicting injury from excessive piety.
60
So far, two varied
interpretations of the same sign have been identified by people that share the same cultural
background. The ice will probably produce more diverse meanings to people of various cultural
backgrounds. This speaks to Bhabha’s argument that Third Space ensures that the meaning and
symbols of culture have no “primordial unity and fixity” and the same signs can be
“appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew.”
61

58
Lin Xiaoping, “Part 1.,” 83.
59
Ibid., 83.
60
Shen Y u, “Zhang Huan,” 33.
“Lie on Ice for Craps” is an ancient Chinese fable that originated from Soushenji. This fable tells
a story of Wang Dongxiang, a Jin dynasty man who lay on the ice of a frozen river to melt it for
carps. Wang did this out of his piety for his family. Though his stepmother never treated him
well, Wang was still willing to bear the icy coldness to catch carps for his sick stepmother and
took care of the family.
61
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 38.
29

Lastly, the idea of incorporating dogs came from, according to the artist, Zhang’s
impression of New York City where many families in New York raise and take good care of
dogs. The fact that people of various colors all blend well into this city and the harmony between
even humans and animals made Zhang realize that the city is a hybrid of various cultures and a
mixture of different races.
62
The Chinese wooden bed with a rail is secure yet hardy, while the
Western ice mattress is chilly, but ravishing and the artist had to endure this icy and multilayered
bed by exhausting his body heat. In Lin’s analysis of this Zhang’s performance, the bed
represented the situation of East versus West and the naked male artist who laid prostrate on the
ice is portrayed a decent man, who was making great effort to resist the seduction of the West,
incarnated by New York City, which appears like a cold temptress.
63
However, what Lin did not
fully explain is the essence of this seduction: the homogenizing force of the culture of Western
liberal democracy which comes with deep cultural binaries. This is what Zhang is truly resisting
and for him, the bed is not a “East VS. West” bed but is more like an East and West hybridized
sandwich.

Interrogating Cultural Identity: Post-Orientalist Negotiation with the Art World

However, to truly subvert and deconstruct the cultural binaries and succeed overseas,

62
Wu Yan, “Zhang Huan: Beijing · New York · Shanghai,” Journal of Suzhou Art & Design
Technology Institute, no. 1 (2010): 63.

63
Lin Xiaoping, “Part 1.,” 83.
30

Zhang Huan, as well as other Chinese artists gradually realize that they need to do much more
than just making a statement and resisting the conditions. In this new cultural and political
context of the postmodern and postcolonial period, Zhang gradually shifts his initial strategy of
simply rebelling against a particular political authority and or certain cultural systems and
binaries, instead, he learns to intervene in these emerging new scenes by exploring the possibility
in the preconditions created by those binaries and his cultural identity. Gao Minglu captured and
described this changing process of Zhang as well as other Chinese artists overseas that:
To be successful, these artists have adopted a strategy of neither emphasizing
nationalistic cultural characteristics to play the role of a minority or exotic nor overtly
de-emphasizing their Chinese identity and becoming internationalists. As they have
begun to realize that cultural differences only appear in a situation of negotiation, they
have presented Chinese traditional; materials not as the touchstones of a monolithic
entity but as dimensions of a material language, and as bridges over which different
interpretations can cross.
64

The continuous interactions of cultural performance between the East and the West produces a
mutable recognition of identity and it is important to note this mutability with respect to both the
postcolonial and the “Orientalist” contexts. Zhang Huang and other Chinese artists are smart
enough to properly use their identity as “an Oriental” to maneuver their artistic path through the
established Western culture and art scene, and at the same time, Zhang interrogates the normative
construction of identity through some of his performances and practices such as Family Tree
(Figure 6). In 2000, Zhang Huang invited three calligraphers to write Chinese texts on his face
from early morning until night and he told them what they should write and to always keep a

64
Gao Minglu, “Toward a Transnational Modernity,” 33.
31

serious attitude when writing the texts even when his face turned dark.
65
Gradually, his personal
attributes were covered by the black ink and no one got to recognize his original skin color, as if
his identity vanished and he disappeared in the night. In a series of nine photos, Zhang
documented the various stages of the transformation of his appearance or identity as an East
Asian artist with some Chinese characters on the face to someone totally unrecognizable with a
pitch-black face completely covered with ink.
66
This documented performance demonstrates the
artist’s reflection on the traditional ways of identity construction which has a long and deeply
embedded history of Western cultural binaries.
The traditional discourse of identity, as argued by Homi Bhabha, consists of the
philosophical tradition of identity as the process of self-reflection in the mirror of human nature
and the anthropological view of the difference of human identity as located in the division
between nature or culture.
67
In other words, the construction of identity often engages with self-
imaging and recognizing binary differences between the self and other. Moreover, several
elements, such as color, race, sex, and culture are the most classic attributes of distinguishing the
self from other. In Zhang’s case, he deals with predominantly the attributes of his cultural
identity as being “an Oriental.” Despite the postcolonial theorists’ persistent questioning of the
binary frame and space of the representation of the self and other, where the confrontation of
differences resides, the intellectual fight for the deconstruction of identity is far from over. The

65
Zhang Huan, “My Principle of Art,” 74.
66
Yilmaz Dziewior, “Seeds of Hamburg,” in Zhang Huan (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2003),
19.

67
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 46.
32

long and persisting Orientalist view of the East possessed by the West is still prevalent in the
postmodern world As Edward Said has argued, one aspect of the electronic, postmodern world is
that there has been a reinforcement of the stereotypes by which the Orient is viewed.
68
As
discussed before, resisting against cultural binaries has become a source of artistic inspiration for
Zhang Huang after his immigration to the U.S. and in this piece, he begins to think more deeply
of his identity in the postcolonial context. What is remarkable about Family Tree is that it
exploits the exoticism of the “Orient,” which more specifically, is the calligraphy of China to
destabilize the established relationship between image and identity by erasing his own identity
attributes in the end of the performance. As Bhabha has argued, by disrupting the stability of the
self, expressed in the equivalence between image and identity, the “secret art of invisibleness” of
which Adil Jussawalla, an Indian migrant poet speaks in his poem, Missing Person (1976)
changes the very terms of our recognition of the person.
69
Zhang’s performance follows the
same logic and visualized the migrant poet’s “secret art of invisibleness” through the gradual
eradication of his visible facial attributes of race and culture by the repeated calligraphy.
It is also noticeable that the content of the calligraphy is, as described by the piece’s title,
about a family story and a spirit of family. In the middle of Zhang’s forehead, the text is titled
“Move the Mountain by Fool (Yu Gong Yi Shan)” and it is a traditional Chinese story that is
known everywhere in China by all people.
70
The story unfolds the challenge that the protagonist

68
Edward W. Said, Orientalism, (New York: Random House, Inc., 1979), 26.
69
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 46-47.
70
Zhang Huan, “My principle of Art,” 74.
“Move the Mountain by Fool” is an ancient Chinese fable that was composed by Lie Zi, a thinker
during the Warring States period in China. It tells the story of Fool, Yu Gong, who tried to move
33

of the story, the Fool will meet and the determination he possesses to move a mountain. The text
also reflects Zhang’s determination like the Fool in the story to continue his art and keep fighting
against various hardship on that path. Other texts are about human fate and like a kind of
divination texts, explaining Zhang’s mingled feeling of mysterious fate that surrounds human life
and the inability to control it.
71
The several texts that Zhang choses, exhibit an ambivalent and
conflicting attitude toward his identity and cultural roots. On the one hand, he is determined to
keep resisting, but one the other hand he is not so sure about the future of his resistance. As Gao
Minglu has pointed out, the “Oriental” identity of Chinese artists overseas is in a constant status
of “negotiation” due to the continual exchange of cultural performance between various
culture.
72
Zhang experienced and would keep experiencing such a status of “negotiation” that
shapes his views of identity and representation of identity. Therefore, in Family Tree, he
deliberately places his existing identity in obscurity and visualizes the process of negotiation.
The gradual mutation on his face signifies Zhang’s contradictory relation to his own culture since
his emigration, at the same time, negating the idea of a homogenous and stable cultural identity
in favor of a subject that changes and repeatedly redefines itself over time, as his face turning
into complete blackness.
73
Zhang’s Family Tree is an effort to deconstruct and dismantle the

a mountain that had blocked his village from major roads. Yu Gong is the eldest of his family and
he gathered the male members to join his great project of moving the mountain. He was ridiculed
by people from other village, but Yu Gong said that even if he cannot finish the project, he has
sons and grandsons and he will have great grandsons in the future. Yu Gong kept moving the
mountain and believed that his project would be finished, though in generations. His persistence
finally moved the god and the god helped him by removing the mountain.
71
Ibid., 74.
72
Gao Minglu, “Toward a Transnational Modernity,” 34.
73
Yilmaz Dziewior, “Seeds of Hamburg,” 19.
34

long existing duality between human identity and image. Such a duality is perpetuated by the
familiar Western frames or mirrors of selfhood that define this image of human identity and
human identity as image and are inscribed in the sign of resemblance.
74
Under the mask of black
ink, Zhang Huan attains the freedom to be anyone coming from any culture and simultaneously
belonging to every culture. Thus, he moves beyond the space of the representation of self and
other and demonstrates the possibility of a fluid identity that can flow across culture and
transcends the boundary and binary of self and other. Moreover, as has argued by Bhabha, self-
consciousness is often refracted and made transparent in the image of human identity and it gives
a sense of autonomy and solidarity to a person.
75
Zhang makes the transparent self-
consciousness an opaque one in his Family Tree and thus, undermines the autonomy of the “self”
by assigning it an unperceivable and mutable identity which is in constant negotiation between
culture. Such a performative intervention or interrogation of identity by Zhang that exceeds the
frame of image and evacuate the self as site of identity and autonomy will leave a resistant trace
and is deemed by Bhabha as “a sign of resistance.”
76
In Zhang Huan’s art, he rethinks his
cultural origin and identity in the situation between the East and the West, creating a refreshed
version of his cultural identity of which the fluidity could function as an overpass to connect and
even help to hybridize multiple culture and thus undermining the existing binaries in the Western
normative construction of identity. This strategy of creating art by Zhang and possibly other

74
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 49.
75
Ibid., 49.
76
Ibid., 49.
35

Chinese artists overseas is called “post-orientalism” by Gao Minglu.
77

Internalizing Violence: Body Art as a Spiritual Resistance to the Mundane World

Despite all the aforementioned conditions and situations that Zhang Huan tries to resist
through his performance, there seems to be a hidden and much more mystified logic or drive for
his resistance behind his bodily art. This hidden drive is buried in the personal history of Zhang
and it is maybe the time to return to the earlier stage of his art-making. As discussed in previous
sections, Zhang began his artistic career as an oil painter when he was a registered as a student in
the Oil Painting Department in the Central Academy of Art. In 1992, Zhang suddenly changed
his artistic focus and devoted himself to performance and he explained the change in an
interview with Qian Zhiqiang in 1999: “My decision to do performance art is directly related to
my personal experience. I have always had troubles in my life. And these troubles often ended up
in physical conflicts. I often found myself in conflict with my circumstances and felt that the
world around me seemed to be intolerant of my existence.”
78
According to Zhang, it seems that
physical violence is entangled with his personal history. Violence seems to be something he often
experience when he was in Beijing. In another interview with Du Xiyun in 2010, Zhang
confessed that violent incidents were a big issue to him during his early 30s, recalling one
extremely bloody and violent confrontation with strangers in a bar, named Car Wash in Beijing

77
Gao Minglu, “Toward a Transnational Modernity,” 34.
78
Qian Zhijian, “Performing Bodies,” 63.
36

and he said that “if he had taken a gun, he would have blown down the whole club.”
79
All of this
history indicates that Zhang is involved with both internal and external violence and he
internalizes the violence to become an integrated part of his performance art. Many scholars have
studied his change in artistic path and have offered various theories including hysteria and
masochism. As discussed before, Katie Hill explains Zhang’s bodily work from the perspective
of psychological hysteria, a concept driven from the Freudian school of psychoanalysis and
proposes that Zhang produces an aesthetic of the hysterical and traumatized body from his
performance, which addresses the conflict between the body and the external environment to
prove the existence of the self.
80
Other theorists like Wu Hung assesses the artist’s sudden shift
from oil painting to bodily work from the perspective of masochism. He argues that Zhang Huan
staged “the series of violent and masochistic performances that have become his trademark” as a
masochistic reaction to his guilt toward the death which overshadowed him through his
upbringing in the poor countryside in Henan and the massive abortion of babies during the
1990s.
81

There is no doubt that Hill and Wu’s observation of Zhang’s performance as
“hysterical” and “masochistic” reflect some critical assessments of the artist’s intense bodily
works. However, though many of Zhang’s performances, especially those produced before he

79
Du Xiyun, Zhao Zilong, and Jia Mingyu, “Born of Fire and Nirvana - Talk with Zhang Huan,”
ArtTime, no. 20 (March 2010), 66.
80
Katie Hill, “Why,” 73-80.
81
Wu Hung, Transience, 105-106.
The One Child Policy was first introduced by the Chinese government in 1982 and the
enforcement of this policy leads to a high abortion rate in China during the 1980s to 2000s.
37

left China in 1998, involves some sort of bodily hysteria and self-torturing, qualifying his
involvement with violence as hysteria or masochism is inadequate. Moreover, Meiling Cheng
has argued that these readings could even be “misleading” and she offers another explanation of
Zhang’s violent act that Zhang uses the body as his artistic language to express resist and
discharge himself from the accumulated external pressures.
82
For Zhang, these external
pressures seem to be inescapable, as reflected in the interviews and by the incident at the bar but
he manages to contain and internalize these pressures and even transform them into a kind of
power. Instead of releasing this power on others, he turns this power to himself and art-making.
Indeed, in an interview in 2008, Zhang said that “he is an essentially homicidal or criminal kind
of person, but he did not pursue that path.”
83
Seeking an escape for his violent impulse may be
able to explain the violence and the hostility of environment in his performance like 65
Kilograms and 12 Square Meters, but an escape seems not to be the ultimate goal for Zhang. In
fact, a deeper spiritual peace is what he wants to achieve. As is widely known, Zhang declared to
be an official lay follower of Tibetan Buddhism in 2006 after eight years of formal study of Zen
meditation in New York.
84
Zhang got to know about Zen Buddhism roughly by the time he came
to New York, but his interest in spirituality seems to begin long before his emigration and can be
traced back to some of the aforementioned performance pieces.
Although Zhang conducts all his performance pieces in a secular cultural context, his

82
Cheng Meiling, Beijing Xingwei, 132.
83
Liu Jingjing, “Zhang Huan ,” 58.
84
Winston Kyan, “The Buddhist Resistance of Zhang Huan’s Pagoda,” published October 16,
2018 at Art Journal Open. http://artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=10012.
38

longing for a spiritual release is perceivable through the violence, environmental hostility, and
bodily suffering and Meiling Cheng suggests that the violence embedded in Zhang’s bodily
works provides a possible reading of the spiritual dimension of them by referring to the theories
from French philosopher René Girard’s anthropological studies of primitive religions in his 1979
work, Violence and the Sacred.
85
Girard’s work enters around three critical issues, violence, the
sacred, and sacrifice. He states that “Violence is the heart and secret soul of the sacred”; “The
sacred consists of all those forces whose dominance over man increases or seems to increase in
proportion to man’s effort to master them”; “Sacrifice is primarily an act of violence without risk
of vengeance.”
86
When applying Girard’s theory to Zhang Huan’s case, it is clear that Zhang
Huan’s bodily works follow the logic of this theory. By deliberately imposing violence or
environmental hostility upon his body, Zhang turns himself into a victim of sacrificial violence,
echoing the fact that he is an actual victim of physical violence in reality and the pressure-laden
relationship between him and the surrounding world. The violence in Zhang’s performance is
sanctified through his self-victimizing process and becomes a spiritual release for him. Zhang
himself also confirms that he prefers to put his body in “physical conditions that ordinary people
have not experienced” and it is only in such conditions that he is able to “experience the
relationship between the body and the spirit.”
87
This process of seeking spiritual release can be
clearly observed in both 12 Square Meters and 65 Kilograms. In 12 Square Meters, Zhang plays

85
Cheng Meiling, Beijing Xingwei, 132.
86
René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1977), 13-31.
87
Qian Zhiqiang, 68.
39

the role of a sacrificial victim or a martyr of China’s fast industrialization, privatization, and
economic growth that pollutes both the environment and the mind of people. During this
performance, Zhang states that his spirit as well as his brain and mind left his body and he forgot
everything.
88
Obviously, Zhang found his long-craving spiritual release in bodily art he kept
pushing the limit of his body. In 65 Kilograms, he invited more audience to his performance and
transformed the artistic scene into what Girard might call, a ritualistic scene. As he was hung
from the ceiling and dripping blood, the audience on the floor serves as the witnesses to the
violence of his holy self-sacrifice. In various performance, Zhang seems to try to let his mind
leave his body to forget the surrounding conditions and he says that this shift between the mind
and the body is what he prefers to experience.
89
It is in the utilization of violence that Zhang
obtains the opportunity to explore his spirituality and the spiritual realm.
After moving to the U.S., Zhang’s performance seems to become less violent, but it
gravitates more and more toward spirituality. Though seemingly less torturing, Zhang’s
performance in the U.S. embodies violence in a more symbolic way. In Pilgrimage - Wind and
Water in New York, violence resides in Zhang’s attempt to melt the ice and resolve the binaries
between the East and the West. Before Zhang’s performance of Pilgrimage - Wind and Water in
New York at the P.S.1, he delivered a short speech and expressed his doubt:
Every day, we lie on a mutant bed, dreaming without any direction . . . I was astonished
and moved by the devotion of the pilgrims. I dreamt of the exhausted and anxious faces
in the subway. I really feel sad for them, for myself, for the blue skies and wonderful
moments. We are surrounded by the fear of violence, war, catastrophe, death, drugs,

88
Mary Jane Jacob, “Zhang Huan,” 241.
89
Qian Zhiqiang, 68.
40

pollution, Aids and basic human surviving. Human beings have been evolving for
thousands of years; modern civilization and technologies have been developed to an
unprecedented degree. I was utterly confused about these changes. However, I doubt if
human beings have made any progress. Are we really happier than before? Where is our
future? Where are our spirit and faith? I am hungry! Behind me, there is wind and
water.
90

When Zhang arrived in New York, he was confronted with a perilous world with things like
violence, war, catastrophe, death, drugs, pollution, AIDS, that could blow up his mind. New York
was a corporeal place with very reduced spirituality and the “the exhausted and anxious faces in
the subway” that are the surrogates of the banality of everyday life. This banality and the
filthiness of human life triggers him to seek further release from spiritual realm. According to
Lin Xiaoping, Zhang’s text alluded to Tibetan Buddhists who used their sexual energy to achieve
a spiritual end.
91
This work marks a significant step of Zhang Huan’s exploration of spirituality
which finally leads him to find spiritual freedom and end his resistance in Buddhist teachings.

Conclusion

A few years after Zhang Huan’s emigration to the U.S., he began to creatively attempt
and explore new forms and medias of art that were unfamiliar to him, including sculpture and
installation, with new materials. With his artistic practices getting more diversified and his work
becoming more of a spectacle, Zhang gains increasing attention and fame for his highly

90
Lin Xiaoping, “Part 1.,” 82.
91
Ibid., 82
41

theatrical sculpture and installation and his performance gradually fades away from his artistic
practices. In 2005, after living in New York for eight years, Zhang returned to China, his
motherland and established an “art factory” of 287,000 square feet in Songjiang, a suburban area
of Shanghai.
92
He shifted his main focuses to large art projects of public sculptures and
installations with the help of his factory. At the same time, he announced his retreat from
performance art which he had been practicing for more than a decade by then and ceased doing it
anymore.
93
Though the rebellious sprit never truly vanishes from Zhang’s art, his artistic
expressions become less radical and his work gradually moves away from explicit resistance to
philosophical and religious reflections.
The radicality of Zhang’s performance from 1990s to 2000s can be tied to what Wu
Huang calls the “intensity of creative energy” resulting from the “intensification” of
contemporary Chinese life.
94
This social intensification was caused by China’s sweeping
process of modernization after Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform in 1978. However, the
modernity achieved in material life failed to generate progress in the sociopolitical system and
that was the root for Zhang Huang and many other post-85 avant-garde artists’ resistance. On the
surface, they were resisting the official art form, but indeed, they were also protesting the lack of
change in the system and the society’s gradual corruption by the system. However, since China’s
explosive development finally slowed down, and the Chinese society became more and more

92
Shen Y u, “Zhang Huan,” 37.
93
Ibid., 37.
94
Wu Hung, “A Case,” 304.
42

stable, the energy for intensive creativity would eventually disappear.
95
Moreover, Zhang’s shift
from radical performance also seems to follow the logics of the changing motivations of
contemporary Chinese art after the mid of 1990s. As Gao Minglu has argued, the drive for art in
China from 1980s to post mid-1990s shifted drastically. He suggests that “the change in direction
of Chinese contemporary art from 1996” until now is essentially different from that “during the
period between the mid-1980s and early 1990s,” which witnessed an intensive renewal and
breakthrough in artistic thoughts and practices lead by Chinese avant-garde artists and based on
“a humanistic conception of artistic value.”
96
All of Zhang’s performance share this humanistic
view of society, culture, industrialization and capitalism development in China as well as in the
West. From his earlier brutal performance with his body such as 12 Square Meters to the later
and more conceptual Family Tree, Zhang consciously bears the idea of humanism in his artistic
creation to reflect on social, political, or cultural conditions and also resist certain systems such
as authoritarian authorities and didactic cultural binaries.
Though in the early 1990s, resistance to authority and a humanistic view of capital were
still the main trends of contemporary art in China, two significant changes that already took
place in relation to the production and exhibiting of Chinese contemporary art. According to
Gao, the first change is the “synchronization of the Chinese art market and domestic collections
with foreign markets” and the second is a loss of “spiritual modernity.”
97
Despite Zhang and

95
Ibid., 304.
96
Gao Minglu, “Changing Motivations of Chinese Contemporary Art Since the Mid 1990s,”
Journal of Visual Art Practice 11, no. 2-3 (September 2012): 210.
97
Ibid., 210.
43

some other artists’ effort to preserve the spirit of Chinese avant-garde and modernity, the
contemporary Chinese art scene began to cater to the taste of Western capitals and opportunists,
who seeks to financially benefit from this rising market. The artistic independence and spiritual
modernity of Chinese contemporary art were gradually abandoned and buried underneath the
huge inflow of capitals into China. Gao suggests that: “today, the West prefers artists who are
relatively philosophical, with a certain depth of thought and a diversified approach towards
artistic expression and the general western interest is not simply in painting, but in installation
and video art with an inclination towards conceptual art.”
98
Despite Zhang’s own seeking of
spiritual freedom which leads his work toward Buddhist concepts and spirituality, Gao’s analysis
of the Western market preferences might also help to explain the reason that Zhang gave up
performance in 2005 and shifted his focus to more abstract and conceptual paintings, sculptures
and installations. It is also in 2005 that Zhang decided to return to China and established his art
factory and the market interests might influence him to peruse more diverse practices in
paintings and installation, since performance seems not to be among the most popular interests of
Chinese contemporary art according to Gao. Because Gao has witnessed that many artists’
practices was changed by this market value, he incisively criticizes the work of Chinese
contemporary art for gradually becoming subject to the “opportunism of the market” and the
“curatorial visions of foreign countries and the work turn out to be increasingly “devoid of
content, stylized and fashion driven.”
99

98
Ibid., 214.
99
Ibid., 210-211.
44

Although it seems unfortunate to witness that Zhang becomes less rebellious both in his
art and attitude, to the artist, it might not always be a bad thing because he might realize that
resistance is not the only way to elicit change in the current situation. In an interview, Zhang
regarded his artistic career as having failed to improve the society, so he and his wife founded the
Gaoan Foundation in 2006 to help to build elementary schools in the western rural poverty areas
of China and to fund students in ten universities.
100
He found a way to actually change the
society rather than just resist the status quo. The efficacy of performance art lies in its
theatricality and expressive nature. As a result, Zhang employs radical strategies, such as
Xianchang, hysteria, subaltern aesthetic, third space, post-orientalism and spirituality to manifest
the social significance in his work, which often addressed the sociopolitical issues of China’s
post-modern society, the Western binary reading of culture and the spiritual void of the post-
capitalized world. Zhang’s performance art as a “social or political happening” often contained a
strongly provocative and aggressive tone towards authority or established social and cultural
situations and because of that, he is inevitably and consistently perceived as a “troublemaker.”
101

However, when the troublemaker ceases to make trouble, he finally begins to initiate the social
change that he had so passionately attempted to instigate through his highly provocative
performance.

100
Du Xiyun, Zhao Zilong, and Jia Mingyu, “Born of Fire and Nirvana,” 71.
101
Gao Minglu, “Private Experience.”
45

Figure 1. Zhang Huan, Angel, 1993. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 2 Zhang Huan, 12 Square Meters, 1994. Courtesy of the artist.

46

Figure 3 Zhang Huan, 65 Kilograms, 1994. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 4 Zhang Huan, To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond, 1997. Courtesy of the artist.
47

Figure 5 Zhang Huan, Pilgrimage - Wind and Water in New York, 1998. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 6 Zhang Huan, Family Tree, 2000. Courtesy of the artist.
48

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Creator Li, Yishun (author)

Core Title Prospering in resistance: the performance art of Zhang Huan from the 1990s to 2000s

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere

Publication Date 05/06/2019

Defense Date 04/29/2019

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag activism,art movement,contemporary Chinese art,cultural binary,identity politics,OAI-PMH Harvest,performance,resistance

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