Source: The Guardian (1/9/15)
Sydney Buddha artist Zhang Huan on Chinese dreams – and public toilets
By Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore
The once angst-ridden performance artist on going from ‘mad man’ to wannabe mayor, and why he built a five-metre high Buddha from ash to bless Sydney.
If artist Zhang Huan were to become mayor of a Chinese town he would change two things. “First the public toilets,” he says, jutting a finger into the air. “Second, the museums.”
Zhang wants to use his rock-star status to promote Chinese culture and to sanitise Chinese cities. But building more – and better – toilets is no mere case of urban planning. For Zhang, toilets are politics. They are poetry. They are art.
In 1994, the then 29-year-old recorded his performance piece 12 Square Metres on black and white film. To mimic the putrefying conditions in Chinese toilets Zhang sat naked, his head shaved, in a prison-like space. Caked in fish oil and honey he waited for the flies to feed. They crawled into his mouth, up his nose, into his ears and his eyes. For one hour exactly Zhang remained still. Then he stood up, walked slowly to a nearby pond, and submerged himself.
“That toilet was my life,” recalls Zhang, noting the poverty of his childhood in rural Henan province and the sparseness of his digs in an artists’ community on Beijing’s outskirts in the 1990s. Public toilets swarmed with shit and flies. Indoor plumbing was then, and remains for many today, a luxury.
For Zhang, however, times have changed. He is now an internationally renowned artist who has been represented by Pace Gallery, New York, since 2007. He employs more than 100 full-time assistants (during busy periods this can rise to 200) who churn out industrial-sized artworks in his 75,000 square foot Shanghai studio.
He continues to surprise, moving from painting to performance to sculpture. This week Zhang is in Australia to promote Sydney Buddha, his majestic ode to eastern spirituality. Standing over five metres tall in Carriageworks’ cavernous central hall, it is his largest installation in Australia to date.
Two Buddhas, representing permanence and transience, face each other. One, a hollow aluminum mould, shimmers in beams of sunlight. Its tranquil head lies severed at its feet. The second buddha is a casting of the first’s interior and is created from 20 tonnes of incense ash sourced from Shanghai temples. As time passes, it will eventually crumble.
“For me [the ash] is souls,” explains Zhang, sitting next to his creation and opening his palms in a gesture of prayer. “This is my Buddha flying here to bless the people and the city.”
Otherworldly, maybe. But Zhang, who is taut and wiry with an open unlined face far more youthful than his 50 years, is also funny and humble. For the launch he is dressed entirely in shades of grey, from his hiking shoes to his cap to his grey polo shirt, the collar upturned. There are traces of the grace and physical poise that made his performance pieces as a young man beautiful: as he talks, he sits bolt upright, sometimes resting his toes on pointe like a ballet dancer.
Zhang was born Dong Ming, meaning “eastern brightness”, in 1965 to factory-worker parents a year before the cultural revolution erupted. Embarrassed by his revolutionary name (an homage to Chairman Mao) he changed it when he moved to Beijing in the 1990s to study at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.
There, living with other poor migrants and artists, he created angst-ridden performance pieces that brimmed with pain and a meditative masochism. That Zhang – the rebellious, dirty, daring artist who hung naked from the ceiling of his studio, suspended in chains, with his blood dripping on to a pan below where it slowly cooked – is gone.
Buddhism provides a link. In his previous works Zhang emulated the mental fortitude that monks seek by enduring extreme physical tests. The art, to many, seemed perplexing and subversive. He says his parents thought it “dangerous and that I was mad” and that for a long time they had no idea what he did. In 2014 a program about him that aired on the Discovery Channel in Asia was banned in China “because some people cannot accept it”.
Zhang only rediscovered Buddhism as a full way of life when he moved back to Shanghai from New York in 2006 after eight years living in the US. Now it informs everything: from the tools he uses, including ash, to the subjects he sculpts. He sees his task to help promote president Xi Jinping’s “Chinese dream”. Zhang insists: “We have to revive all our traditional ancestors’ culture and art.”
Savvy, and commercially viable, Zhang has ridden the wave of the Chinese art boom. (It has no signs of slowing down: he is designing a flagship store-cum-art gallery for a Chinese diamond company.) Embracing this side of things has inevitably led to a dulling of his edge. Zhang recently packed his teenage son off to a London boarding school with the advice: help others, study hard and “avoid traffic, sex, girlfriends and drugs”.
Back in Carriageworks, the disintegrating ash Buddha, surrounded by swirls of incense, is a reminder of Zhang’s own fluidity and fortune. “I always believed in the traditional Chinese doctrine: that you keep changing and this is the rule of the universe,” asserts the artist. “I feel I am so lucky to change from a mad man to a man with good food and a family man, to have my children. I feel that Buddhism has blessed me.”
Zhang is carefully weighing up how to spend his next 30 years – and how to stretch them out to feel like 300. One idea is to abandon art to become a monk; another is to spend 10 years doing 10 exhibitions in 10 of the world’s most important museums. Another is to become mayor. Because, as Zhang notes, there is a lot to do. While New York snoozes, “China never sleeps.”
• Sydney Buddha is at Carriageworks until 15 March. Sydney festival 2015 runs from 8 to 26 January at venues citywide. Find all Guardian Australia’s coveragehere