On Zhang Huan's

Chan Shing Kwan Public Displays of Affliction: On Zhang Huan’s 12m 2 I had discovered that my body could become my language, it was the closest thing to who I was and it allowed me to become known to others…. It allowed me to express some very deep emotions coming from different places. 1 — Zhang Huan Zhang Huan, 12m2, 1994, magine your repugnance performance, Beijing. Courtesy of Zhang Huan Studio, upon witnessing myriad flies Shanghai. Ilanding on the skin of an artist’s unclothed body; imagine the persistent anguish of being confined in a public lavatory on a sweltering midsummer day, and attempt to enunciate the sounds of aversion as the stench of excrement permeates the air. Such combinations of gruesome physical affliction and extreme psychological endurance, which were all realized in a single action titled 12m2 (1994), epitomize the early abject art performances orchestrated by Chinese artist Zhang Huan. First in China and later in the global art arena, Zhang Huan daringly carried out intense art performances between 1993 and 2005 into which he unleashed personal, social, and political distress by pushing his body and psyche to the limits of tolerance. As Zhang Huan’s statement above highlights, the artist’s seemingly over-the-top performance works were in fact genuinely intended as a means to convey a thought or a feeling through a series of staged gestures and decisive actions. Although the number of viewers present at his early acts of fierce abjection was tiny, the artist quickly established his reputation through the photographs and video documentation of his performances that circulated in transnational exhibitions during the 1990s and 2000s. Between 1993 and 1998, Zhang Huan presented the majority of his performance works in a now demolished bohemian community called Beijing East Village, which was located on the outskirts of the capital city of China. During that time span, Zhang Huan and other like-minded artists such as Ma Liuming and Zhu Ming staged a diverse range of controversial performances. These performers lived like the penniless artists of New Vol. 17 No. 1 97 York’s East Village in the 1980s, such Zhang Huan, Seeds of Hamburg, 2002, performance, that their bodies became their major Hamburg Kunstverein. Courtesy of Zhang Huan medium of artistic expression. Studio, Shanghai. Whether in real time or through documentation, the unconventional displays of Zhang Huan’s own body provided the context of his artistic practices. His international career was launched when he immigrated to New York in 1998, and between then and 2005 his performances became increasingly choreographed and included more participants, with the artist performing acts at various locations around the world including Seattle (1999), Santiago (2001), Hamburg (2002), Sydney (2004), and Rome (2005).2 After Zhang Huan abandoned performance art in 2005, the artist founded an art studio in Shanghai, where his focus has been to embrace the creation of tangible artworks such as sculpture, installation, and painting. Although he ended his performance phase, Zhang Huan’s sensational acts have never left the limelight. Photographs, and at times documentary videos, of his performances continue to be disseminated through the Internet, art galleries, and auction houses. In 2014, Family Tree (2000), a series of nine photographs that document a gradual obscuring of Zhang Huan’s face with inked Chinese idioms until it is completely blackened, was sold at Christie’s for USD $642,591, nearly triple its estimate. Recently, his performance pieces like Family Tree and To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain (1995), together with works by other contemporary Chinese artists like Ai Weiwei and Zhang Xiaogang, were featured in Hong Kong’s M+ Sigg Collection: Four Decades of Chinese Contemporary Art in 2016. Zhang Huan, Family Tree, 2000, nine chromogenic prints, 56.5 x 43.8 cm each. Courtesy of Zhang Huan Studio, Shanghai. 98 Vol. 17 No. 1 Zhang Huan, To Add One Writers and art critics have made Meter to an Anonymous Mountain, 1995, performance, various attempts to interpret Zhang Beijing. Courtesy of Zhang Huan Studio, Shanghai. Huan’s art performances. Notably, many of them analyze Zhang Huan’s acts based on the contexts of cultural identity or so-called “Chineseness.” For instance, art historian Paul Gladston remarks that Zhang Huan and other artists in Beijing East Village developed and recorded performance-based practices, which “focused on questions of identity.”3 In 2013, Agnes Hsu directed a four-part documentary series titled “Chineseness,” which was broadcast on Discovery Channel and aimed to examine the idea of “a renaissance in Chinese identity through the lives and work of four prominent contemporary Chinese artists,” Zhang Huan among them.4 Zhang Huan himself has seemed disappointed by this hyper- attention to the cultural identity or “Chineseness” of artists from China, which he finds symptomatic of the state of contemporary Chinese art within the larger art world: “When Westerners discuss contemporary art in China, they talk about ‘China’ first and ‘art’ later.”5 Indeed, many critics and writers have been inclined to comment on his work primarily as the work of a Chinese artist; thus, only limited literature exists about Zhang Huan’s performances beyond the discussion of cultural identity. In order to better understand Zhang’s performances, this essay intends to explore these works from a theoretical and historical perspective. At first glance, the title of this essay, “Public Displays of Affliction,” appears to be an innocuous pun, a tongue-in-cheek play on words. However, this title also references two phenomena of the artist’s performance-based practices. First, the term “public displays” refers to the ways Zhang Huan has displayed his body in his art performances. Second, the word “affliction” indicates the agony, affliction, and abjection he endured for his performance acts. Here I focus on Zhang Huan’s 1994 performance 12m2, and I examine the roles that affliction and abjection play in his performances as well as their secondary representations. By arguing that his performances are also legible particularly through the theoretical trope of abjection, I am suggesting that “cultural identity” and “Chineseness” are not adequate analytical tools through which to achieve a more comprehensive reflection of Zhang Huan’s art performances, as well as works by other contemporary Chinese artists. Enacted inside a public toilet in Beijing East Village, 12m2 is likely Zhang Huan’s most famous (or infamous) work of art. It was documented both by video and photographs. In a widely reproduced monochrome photograph of 12m2, Zhang Huan juxtaposes his lean young figure and austere features with the unsanitary setting of a public lavatory. A slick substance that attracts swarming flies covers every inch of the artist’s upper-body, including his clean-shaven head, stoic face, and resolute mouth. The attractant is later revealed to be a sticky amalgam of honey and fish sauce. Writing on the wall reads “Please pay attention to the public hygiene” (请讲究公共卫生), in sharp contrast to the artist, who is engulfed by buzzing flies—common vectors of disease. The photo-shoot was arranged by Ai Weiwei, who was at times stopping by Beijing East Village, and the photographer Rong Rong.6 Vol. 17 No. 1 99 According to Rong Rong, Zhang Huan Zhang Huan, 12m2, 1994, performance, Beijing. Photo: remained unflinching through the entire Rong Rong. Courtesy of Zhang Huan Studio, Shanghai. performance. Even when flies began to land on his nude body, he still sat as motionless as a sculpture.7 Approximately one hour later, Zhang Huan stood up and sauntered out of the stall.8 The artist walked toward a pond behind the toilet and went straight into the cold water. A rarely reproduced series of photographs demonstrate the culmination of his performance; as the water gets deeper and deeper, Zhang Huan’s naked body slowly disappears, leaving only ripples on the surface of the pond. 12m2 was no doubt an agonizing and abhorrent experience, one that suggests abjection. In a literal sense, the term abjection means the state of experiencing something unpleasant, debasing, or traumatic to the maximum degree. In her book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva examines the visceral terror and allure of abjection. She views abjection as an ill-defined feeling of repulsion: Zhang Huan, 12m2, 1994, performance, Beijing. Photo: Rong Rong. Courtesy of Zhang Huan Studio, Shanghai. There looms within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself. 9 In simpler terms, abjection is a bleak state of mind, a primal sense of detestation and aversion. In this regard, Zhang Huan’s exercise in 12m2 can be considered an abject art performance, as the artist underwent immense physical and psychological distress purely for the sake of his work. In this performance, he also shared the abject experience of revulsion with his audience. While Zhang Huan was the only one to be covered in a liquid “fly 100 Vol. 17 No. 1 attractant,” his viewers, including Rong Rong and Ai Weiwei, also endured the repugnant setting of the toilet as well as the swarming flies. As Rong Rong recalled in a letter to his sister, he too suffered from this horrendous experience and went through an unsettling emotional state of repulsion: 11:30 am yesterday. In a few minutes, swarms of flies started covering his body. I had put on a mouth cover that I had prepared the day before. You know how stinky that public toilet is.

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