Haunch of Venison
Lessingstrasse 5
+41 43 422 88 88
Zürich
Zhang Huan
Memory Doors
23 January-28 March 2009
Chinese artist Zhang Huan presents a selection of recent work in a variety of different media: rough-hewn "Memory Doors" delicately rendered "Earth Life" paintings, and internationally acclaimed large scale ash paintings and sculptures.
Zhang Huan began working on his "Memory Doors" series in 2006. They are composed of black and white screen prints of historical photographs from the 1920s through 1980s affixed to heavy wooden household doors from the Chinese province of Shanxi. Selected areas of the door are carved into to create
bas-reliefs which interact with the remaining parts of the photographs. The imagery on the doors relates to historical and military events, labour scenes, individual memories, regional myths and political meetings in the recent history of China.
Zhang Huan's "Earth Life" insect paintings are, as the artist states, about "everyday life, the human life". Large, pale, luminous canvases featuring life-size, painstakingly hand-painted dragonflies,mosquitoes, ants and cicadas refer to Zhang Huan's concern for small creatures but, more importantly, are a very poetic depiction of Zhang Huan's everyday life experience in China.
While incense ash has long been revered by eastern cultures for its spiritual and medicinal properties, Zhang Huan views this unique and poetic medium as the direct embodiment of a nation's collective memory: the literal debris of the dreams, hopes and remembrances of the millions of people for whom incense-burning is a daily ritual. Sifted into palettes of varying grades from the finest dust to coarse flakes, the ash is applied to large canvases and sculptural busts modeled on the artist's own face. The source imagery for Zhang Huan's ash paintings includes old photographs of family and friends, and the recognisable socialist realist iconography of the Cultural Revolution.
A key figure of Beijing's "East Village" community in the early 1990s, Zhang Huan came to international prominence during his seven years residence in New York where he was mainly concerned with radical, body-based performances in which social and political concerns were articulated through acts of physical endurance. "12 Square Metres" (1994) famously saw him squat for an hour in a public latrine while flies swarmed around his naked body. Zhang Huan returned to China in 2005 where his practice expanded to encompass traditional media such as painting, sculpture and printmaking, as well as ambitious large-scale installations and mixed media works. Today he runs a studio complex in Shanghai.
