Zhang Huan, born in 1965 in the Chinese province Honan, was among the first artists in China who at the beginning of the nineties turned to performance art. Although its underground-based protagonists were rarely permitted to appear publicly in Beijing, the "Beijing East Village" artist colony was amazingly fast to draw the attention of the Western world. Since the middle of the nineties, Huan´s works could be viewed in Europe, Japan and the U.S., at first chiefly on video or photographs. In 1998, he showed his first performance to a larger public in New York, where he currently lives and works as an artist. At the centre of Huan´s early works were psychological and physical extreme situations to which he submitted his naked body. For his formally stringent work "To Raise the Water Level in a Fish Pond", Huan had a group of farm workers
climb into a fish pond near Beijing in 1997, thus creating an image for the drift to the cities, the flooding of cities with vast numbers of people, the assimilation of individuals in an underprivileged mass without vote. Here, he for the first time used choreographic means in his work. On the whole, theatrical concepts and narrative structures have started to play a larger role in Huan's work since the end of the nineties.
Exhibition in Hamburg November 30, 2002 - February 9, 2003.
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