When Zhang and I enter the printing workshop, two assistants are asleep atop a stack of wood slabs the size of a parking space. The naps are sanctioned; the studio goes into sleep mode between noon and 1 p.m., when lunch is served on metal trays. (Running a large studio has its challenges: Despite the presence of two in-house chefs, Zhang says, the staff is complaining that they’re bored with the food.) It isn’t long before the sound of rocks being rubbed over carved wood—a traditional Chinese printing method—echoes in the workshop.

Similarly, the “Memory Door” workshop goes quickly from silence to a cacophony of hammering as some dozen assistants set to work on antique wood portals collected from the Shanxi province. Mounted on each door are silkscreens of black-and-white photographs depicting historical scenes of daily life in China. Parts of the pictures are sculpted into the wood. Zhang points out how much more detailed the carved portion of one panel is than the grainy photograph attached to it: In the photo the leaping fish are mere shadows; in the carving they have scales and lips. “There are two different worlds here,” he says. “Something from reality and something from imagination.”

Zhang himself seems to thrive in two different spheres. His production setup, schedule of visitors (he mentions a Rothschild family member and Glenn Lowry, director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art) and accessibility to the press suggest an acute businessman. Then there is the philosopher and creator. “I’ve thought about stopping and dropping everything, but I will still age and die,” he says, inhaling a steady stream of superslim cigarettes. “I can put out all my ideas and make all this work with enthusiasm while I’m still alive. When you’re really involved in your work, you don’t have time to contemplate other things, such as basic living conditions and the meaning of life.”

It might be those kinds of matters that weigh on Zhang during what he calls the most intolerable moments of his day: the few minutes when he is just waking up from his lunchtime nap. This he takes underneath his desk, in a roughly two-foot-high space outfitted with a mattress, pillow, sheets and comforter. “I feel safe on a low level. It quiets me down,” he says. The bed in the Shanghai home he shares with his wife and two young children is simple as well.

For all his success, Zhang hasn’t shaken the memories of his less fortunate days, when he struggled with money, school and, one suspects, social convention. In one of the workshops—toward the back of the shed near a barking German shepherd—a stuffed cow hangs impaled on a pole, its head wrapped in a white cloth, over a bucket. Henan Bull No. 2 relates to an incident from his youth when two men in a bar smashed his face with beer bottles and he found himself in the hospital, head swathed in bandages, without money. For Zhang, art remains a way of expressing his memories and identity. His latest creative vocabulary—ash, historical images, Buddhist sculpture—reflects the inspiration of old Chinese materials and objects that he rediscovered upon returning to his homeland.

A short drive away, in another industrial warehouse, workers are variously welding metal, splitting a huge tire and constructing what will be a massive, 12-foot-high wood cylinder of Chinese medicine drawers. One wedge of the wheel, which will ultimately be some 30 feet in diameter and consist of 6,080 drawers, appears complete. Zhang pulls out a drawer big enough to comfortably hold a baby or two, and says he hasn’t yet decided what to fill the compartments with. Traditionally, they are tiny and hold herbal remedies. In the hands of another artist, the scale of the project might seem like a gimmick. But Zhang’s visible attachment to the emblems of his culture make it clear that his large works are grand statements informed by sheer exuberance.

A day that began with a relaxing talk in the artist’s intimate office is about to finish with a flourish. He opens his umbrella, and we wade through pools of rainwater into the largest workshop yet. The scene unfolds like a Terry Gilliam fantasy: The blackened Chinese Warrior, some two stories high, emerges from a fog of smoke, streams of which rise from his enormous breastplate. The hulking statue is covered entirely with ash from incense burned at temples in and around Shanghai. Zhang walks around the back of the armored figure to a small metal door. The source of the smoke turns out to be a pail of incense sticks burning vigorously inside his belly.