Zhang Huan
Dicecream Magazine🔳🗿🎬📷Zhang Huan (born 1965) is a Chinese artist based in Shanghai and New York City.
Perhaps best known for performances that test his own physical and mental endurance, Zhang creates symbolic self-portraits that question the role of family and culture in shaping contemporary life.
He staged his first performance, Angel (1993), at the National Art Museum of China, wherein the artist laid almost naked in the entrance hall, covering his body red liquid and parts of a dismembered doll in a reference to the controversial one-child policy.
Zhang’s performances always involve his body in one way or another, usually naked, occasionally involving masochistic actions.
For example, an exhibited photography showed him as "a naked man, his head half-shaved, sitting in a prison-like space. His skin was wet and covered with flies. His face looked blank but tough, as if he were trying to meditate his way through pain."
Today, his works can be found in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, and the Harvard University Art Museum, among others.
Zhang lives and works between Beijing, China and New York, NY.
