In the Studio: Zhang Huan

Photo by Daniel Traub

Zhang in his wood-carving workshop near Shanghai. Part of Zhang's daily routine is a nap under his desk. "It quiets me down," he says.

Photo by Daniel Traub

Zhang in front of one of his ash sculptures. Zhang's work is on view at the Asia Society in New York through January 20.

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SHANGHAI—Zhang Huan has discovered a different kind of Nirvana. Back in the mid-1990s, it was the Seattle grunge band of that name that inspired him as an impoverished Beijing-based performance artist. The work he produced, like the music he listened to, was subversive: He slathered his body with honey and fish oil to attract flies in a public toilet and, in another piece, encased his naked torso in the rib cages of pig carcasses from a local market. Each performance was a testimony of personal experience, whether testing his ability to endure pain or measuring himself against a pond or a mountain.

A less evident influence at the time was the Buddhist temple music he also favored. “I had no idea what the rockers were singing about. I didn’t know what the Buddhist music was about either, but I liked the melodies a lot,” Zhang recently told an audience at the Asia Society in New York, where a retrospective of his work is on view through January 20.

As several new sculptures in the show make clear, Buddhism has emerged as a prevalent theme in the artist’s work. A giant copper arm, Fresh Open Buddha Hand, lies with deceptive lightness across one gallery, the palm of the hand split open. In another room, a massive head made of incense ash and steel, Long Ear Ash Head, melds the artist’s image with the elongated earlobes that represent joy and good fortune in the Buddhist religion. Gone are the angst and confrontation so characteristic of Zhang’s performances. In their place are art objects infused with serenity and a reverence for Chinese tradition and history.

The 42-year-old artist attributes the shift in his sensibility to the mellowing effect of growing older, but Zhang is not a man content to stay still. He appears to have barely aged since he pulled and pinched his face in Skin a decade ago. His gaze is steady and direct. And his toned, compact body, often nude in his performance art, moves with deliberate grace. This outward stillness belies a mind that is in constant motion, rich with ideas and ambition. “My brain is my studio,” he says. If that’s the case, his brain takes up some 75,000 square feet of industrial space.

The day I arrive at his studio in Xin Zhuang, about an hour’s drive from Shanghai, torrential rains are saturating the area. Water drips through the roof of various workshops housed in a cavernous shed formerly occupied by a Japanese clothing factory. Zhang took over the site in 2006, after a fire gutted the company’s operations. “In China, it’s believed that once you move into a place that’s burned,” explains our translator, “your business will catch fire.”

This has certainly been true for Zhang, although his career momentum had been building for a decade. His performance pieces brought him attention in the late 1990s from P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center and the Asia Society, both in New York; a move to that city followed, as did performances in the U.S., Europe and Australia. His timing was impeccable: As contemporary Chinese artists became the talk of the art world, Zhang was well positioned to translate critical attention into commercial success. After eight years in New York, however, he no longer felt it was the perfect city he had envisioned during his Beijing days. He was also growing tired of performance art.

Zhang says it was fate that brought him to Shanghai. A fortune teller told him that a suitable place for his next move would be in eastern China or somewhere northeast of his birthplace, in the Henan province. Once settled in Shanghai, and aided by an average of 100 assistants, he quickly started producing the ash paintings, copper sculptures, woodcut prints and “Memory Door” series of carved portals that define his most recent body of work. This fall, in addition to the Asia Society show, Zhang’s richly textured ash paintings and sculptures were exhibited at Haunch of Venison in London and Berlin. The artist has also signed on with PaceWildenstein, in New York, which plans to hold an exhibition of his work in its two downtown spaces in May 2008. Pace founder Arne Glimcher was so taken with Zhang’s studio that its spirit will be transported to New York during the show, when several of the artist’s wood-carvers will set up shop in the gallery. Glimcher calls Zhang “a force of nature, the likes of which I’ve only seen a couple of times before.”