Why Chinese performance artist Zhang Huan returned to painting

Contemporary Chinese artist Zhang Huan is celebrated as a painter, performance artist, sculptor and photographer. Although he is known more for his performance art over the past 20 years, he has recently returned to his first love – painting.

The cognac brand saw a kindred of spirit of adventure and that of breaking new frontiers between them and the Shanghai-based artist.

And indeed, in his career, Zhang has explored and broken through new frontiers since his early years as an emerging artist in Beijing East Village, an artistic community on the outskirts of the capital, comprising Zhang and his art school friends. This is where they pioneered a particular style of performance art, which usually involved the naked body.

One of their works, titled To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain (1995), saw Zhang and nine other artists climb a mountain near Beijing, where they stripped and lay on top of one another to create a second mini peak. Authorities at the time deemed this inappropriate.

“I wanted to make the mountain one metre higher. To make this work, I looked at many different mountains outside Beijing and picked this specific mountain. I liked this mountain. My friends piled up their naked bodies on top of the mountain [to make it taller by one metre, or three feet],” said the artist at the time.

Zhang involved the body in his sculptures, too, making giant copper heads, hands and feet – magnified versions of broken Buddhist figures that he found in Tibet.

Born in Anyang, Henan province, China in 1965, Zhang was sent to live with his grandmother from the age of one until he was eight years old. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at Henan University and went on to get a Mater of Arts degree from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1993.