Zhang Huan - Yilmaz Dziewior

Zhang Huan, born in 1965 in the Chinese province Honan, was among the first artists in China who turned to performance art at the beginning of the 1990s. Although its underground-based protagonists were rarely permitted to appear publicly in Beijing, the Beijing East Village artist colony was amazingly fast to attract the attention of the Western world. Since the mid-90s, Huan's works have been viewed in Europe, Japan and the US, at first chiefly on video or in 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 physically extreme situations to which he submitted his naked body. Since the end of the 1990s theatrical concepts, choreography and narrative structures have started to play a larger role in Huan's work. In the piece, "To Raise the Water Level in a Fish Pond" (1997), Huan had a group of farm workers climb into a fish pond near Beijing, thus creating an image for the flooding of cities with vast numbers of people.