Zhang Huan is widely considered to be one of the most vital and influential contemporary artists working today.  He was born in 1965 in a small town called Anyang in Henan Province just prior to the Cultural Revolution.  At one year of age, Zhang Huan went to live with his grandparents in a tiny village in the countryside known as Tangyin County.  At age fourteen, he started his artistic training in the so-called Su-style or Soviet style and traveled by bus each day for his lessons.

Zhang enrolled in undergraduate studies at the Art Department, Henan University, Kaifeng to concentrate on Chinese ink painting, drawing, oil painting and art history in 1984.  Upon completion in 1988, Zhang was an instructor at Zhengzhou College of Education for three years.  He studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing from 1991 to 1993, and it was during this period that he first started experimenting with performance art.  Zhang Huan’s first public performance was called Angel, which he staged on the front steps of the National Art Museum of China as part of a group exhibition for students at the Central Academy.  Angel was openly critical of the Chinese government’s controversial “one child” policy and it resulted in the entire exhibition being closed.

During this same period, a group of young Chinese artists, including Zhang Huan, established the “Beijing East Village.”  It was in this community that Zhang developed his early performance practices and many of the works that would soon bring him international attention.  Conceived as both existential explorations and social commentary, performances like 12 Square Meters, in which the artist sat for an hour, covered in honey and fish oil, in a fly infested public latrine or To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain, where nine people lay on top of one another to raise the summit by a meter. These performances and many others came to be known by their photographic documentation, which are now considered the artist’s first iconic works.

Description: Hard bound with grey boards, no dust jacket. 179 pages profusely illustrated. Published on the occasion of the October 10, 2007 London exhibition.

Bookseller Inventory # 18037

SOLD

Zhang Huan : Ash
Huan, Zhang

Publisher: Haunch of Venison, London
Publication Date: 2007
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Very Good

Description: Hard bound with wood vaneer on cardboard, no dust jacket, as issued. Published on the occasion of the May 9, 2008 exhibition. Mnor wear to boards, otherwise very good.

Bookseller Inventory # 16956

SOLD

Zhang Huan : Blessings
Huan, Zhang

Publisher: Pace Wildenstein, New York
Publication Date: 2008
Binding: Hard Cover
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket, As Issued
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Sold ·