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Published at 1:48pm
Published on 7/24/08
Video
Chinese contemporary art may be this year’s hottest trend, but artist Zhang Huan doesn’t need the hype to make his mark in New York. The scale and ambition of his work have garnered support from the likes of Arne Glimcher at PaceWildenstein and Charles Saatchi in London, both of whom will show his pieces in 2008. New Yorkers will get a preview of this protean talent with “Altered States,” his first museum retrospective, opening at Asia Society in the fall.
“I don’t want to be known as an artist who does only one thing,” Zhang declared at his studio in Shanghai earlier this summer. No worries there: His workspace takes up two factory buildings, where more than 100 workers busily create woodcuts, silk-screen prints, carvings, installations, paintings and, most notably, sculpture of incredible scale. Asia Society had to remove windows to bring in two of these behemoths for the exhibition: Buddha Hand, a 22-by-15- foot copper artifact, and Long Ear Ash Head, an incense-burning self-portrait bust that reaches 14 feet in height.
Frustrated by a society in which his experimental performance art was strictly forbidden, Zhang immigrated to New York in 1998. But in 2006 his monumental works required his return to China, the only place where he could find the space and craftsmen to match his vision. “China is, in a way, more free than New York, because in New York, everything is so free that you lose your appreciation of freedom,” says Zhang. Certainly, the collision of traditions and innovation taking place in today’s China has stimulated this artist in his ever-more complex and ambitious artworks. With a production line that now rivals those of Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, Zhang is set to take on the art world. This show will test whether we’re ready to accept the challenge.
“Zhang Huan: Altered States” is at Asia Society Thu 6–Jan 20.
