artist wearing white jacket and shirt gazing into distance above the camera

Zhang Huan

1 collaboration

zhang huan holding a skeleton
artist wearing white jacket and shirt gazing into distance above the camera

Zhang Huan

“It’s about the spirit of conquering the unconquerable. I want to make work so people can be moved by a sense of the possible.”

A serial provocateur, probing the fundamentals of life.

Zhang’s conceptual, multidisciplinary artworks explore a weighty series of subjects spanning politics, history, religion, and humanity. During the last 3 decades he has exhibited at some of the world’s most prestigious museums, and in 2020 became the first living Chinese artist to have a solo show at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. In the 1990s his early performances captured the attention of the contemporary art world. Angel (1993) saw him naked in pools of red paint holding a plastic baby outside the National Art Gallery in Beijing, its provocative format and criticism of China...

Bio

Zhang Huan was born in 1965 in Anyang, China, and is now based in Shanghai.

Collections

Works featured in collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Asia Museum of Fukuoka, Japan; The Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Saatchi Gallery, London.

Did you know?

In 1994 performance piece 12 Square Meters, Huan coated himself in honey and fish oil to attract swarms of flies as he sat motionless in a public bathroom. Zhang's early career is defined by several such performances testing the limits of discomfort that his body could endure.


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