Zhang Huan was born in 1965 in Ang Yang in the Chinese province of He Nan, where he studied at the university.

In 1991, he returned to Henan in Beijing to study at the Central Institute of Fine Arts in the Painting department. Unable to conform to the Academy's teaching methods, he left school and rented a studio, attempting to create a personal body of work. Having decided to found an artists' community that would differ from the Yuan Ming Yuan colony, he moved to the eastern outskirts of Beijing, to an area known as Ashan Village in the Chaoyang district. There, he gathered together other artists including Zhang Yang and Wang Shihua, who also wanted to take advantage of the low rent and cost of living. The group named itself "East Village," referring both to its whereabouts in the eastern suburbs of Beijing and to the spirit of New York's East Village. There, energized by the spirit of creativity and a sense of freedom, they set out to create an experimental village. In 1993, visiting the colony after an exhibition of their work in Peking, British artists Gilbert and George offered much encouragement. Nonetheless, in the wretched living conditions of the impoverished colony, daily existence was nearly unbearable; among the garbage dumps, filthy latrines, dog droppings, and wandering fruit and vegetable vendors, the artists felt like pariahs, like the discarded scraps of a civilized society. In random invasions of the colony, in which local police would harass them and suspend their artistic activities. Such confrontations with the Chinese authorities increased their misery, at once social, economic, and mental.

The Performances

His life
Zhang Huan's decision to become a performance artist was directly linked to his personal experience. Problems encountered in life have had an extremely strong impact on his work, with intolerable physical conflicts accentuating his denial of his own existence. He shaved his head, dressed in black, and was often rejected or attacked in public places. He came to see his body as his principal means of communication with the world, and that painting was no longer sufficient as a means of self-expression. His body became his predominant medium, his artistic language. Haunted to the point of madness by phobias, anxieties, and nightmares, such as that of a stranger's coming to cut off his ears, he exorcised these terrors with self-inflicted torture. Rebelling against the economic oppression he suffered in China, artistic repression, and against the dominant society that had exploited him, he developed a brutal gesture that allowed him to fight back willfully. He understood that these moments of frenzy and rage calmed his anxiety, and became conscious that such violent acts were also an expression of solidarity with his Chinese countrymen, with their struggle to survive and their constant state of exhaustion.

Zhang Huan's knowledge of current artistic events in performance art overseas came to him through catalogs and in the translation of the book "Conversation." His first performance took place in a public space in October 1993 at the National Art Gallery in Beijing, which had been planning a group exhibition. When the painting exhibition was cancelled at the last moment, Zhang Huan decided to transform his installation into a performance : "The Angel". Placing a tub filled with a blood-red liquid and some bath toys on a white sheet, he undressed, then poured the contents over his head. He impaled a doll from the performance, entered the gallery, and hung it on the wall, in the spot where his installation would have been. Reactions were swift and violent; the exhibition was cancelled, and the artist condemned to pay a fine, then to write a scathing critique of his own work. The press covered him with insults. In 1995, Zhang Huan expanded his investigation of life and the community and of their relationship to the pressures of various environments, thus involving the active collaboration of other artist, other groups, and the public.

The environment
In his daily life in the East Village, he was repulsed by the squalor of the locale, the refuse, the foul-smelling latrines filled with flies. This drove him to a terrible performance entitled "12 Square Meters" (1994), in which his naked body was coated with a viscous, fish-based liquid and honey meant to attract flies, which stuck to his flesh for an hour. Thus he engaged the public in an immediate confrontation with horror and cruelty, to which they became both witnesses and participants. In "65 kg," he chained himself nude to the ceiling of his house above a frying pan of blood boiling on the stove, as its acrid, sickening odor invaded the room. Enclosed in the room with him, the spectators became horrified, empathetic voyeurs.

Animals
Zhang Huan uses objects or animals as the poles of repulsion for body contact, or tocreate analogies with his own suffering. He raises spiders, insects, and worms for observation. In "Original Sound," in January 1995, he chose to manipulate earthworms, stuffing them into his mouth and devouring them, thus bringing together the worm's nature with that of man, who also comes from the earth and returns to it at the end of his life. Dogs would lead him study to life in New York, where they are numerous and relatively well treated; he has compared his life to theirs. Sensitive to their environment yet nevertheless conscious of danger, dogs express the coexistence of different races and cultures.

Adventure
In "25-mm threading steel" (1995), he lay down naked at a construction site, on a cutting slab used by workers crushing steel tubes. Flung onto his body, the burning steel sparks created a feeling of danger and gave him a powerful sense of his own existence.

Spirituality and the body
Far from the meditative practices of Zen Buddhism or the Martial Arts of his culture, Zhang Huan prefers a more personal approach, supported by Chan music and the exceptional conditions to which his body submits itself. He concentrates in his performances in such a way that his spirit flows out of its physical envelope; he pulls himself out of his literal environment and forgets his pain. Passing through this bath of suffering and mental isolation, he meanders between two states that make him aware of his spiritual discomfort while creating an acute consciousness of his own body. Often, he is invaded by visual or aural hallucinations. Nudity is indispensable in his performances-it allows his body to exist, to feel fully, to reach his spirit, to identify itself in direct contact with the object. In "Fengshui" in New York, his nude flesh touches ice, animals, sparks, train tracks, flies, earthworms. His nudity is in no way connected to intimacy or sex.

Politics and emigration
Zhang Huan deliberately rebels against Occidental interpretations, but is one of the first artists to utilize performance as an artistic medium since the events of June 4,1989. He has never had the opportunity to show his work in his own country. Born in the late 1960s, he still has a vague memory of the Cultural Revolution, and studied when China was beginning to open itself to the rest of the world. Like the majority of artists of his generation, he has been highly influenced by the connections between the history of Western art and new experiences of Chinese artists in the 1980s. The complexity of Chinese problems oblige him to remain detached, even more so because they consider him to be crazy, perverse, masochistic. In 1996, he began to attract the attention of an international audience and to show his work overseas. He then left China to live in the United States, where he remains conscious of the coexistence of races and cultures. In his exhibition "Fengshui" at P.S.1 in New York, he associates himself with the city's vitality and vigor. Nevertheless, shock and fear remain; he tries to melt reality as he had melted ice with his body heat. In "My America" (Hard to acclimatize) in 1999 (Deitch Projects and the Seattle Asian Art Museum), Huan assembled an array of naked people in a kind of pilgrimage, who tossed bread at him into the center of a circle. Even in fusing the two cultures, he expressed his difficulty in adapting to America, all the while celebrating the freedom he has found in his new adopted country.