No matter what he produces in the future, Zhang’s hauntingly beautiful ash paintings and sculptures will probably define him as an artist as much as the toilet performance in Beijing 13 years ago. “I created a new genre, a new phenomenon,” he says. “There are so many different ways to use ash; I probably won’t lose interest in it for a while. It moves me the most—it’s able to seep through me. What’s left in it are the remnants of so many souls.”

Pointing to several dozen bins, buckets and barrels of the ash clustered in one area of the workshop, Zhang explains that different kinds of incense, used during prayers, produce different colors and grades of residue. The nuances of gray tones and texture, from fine dust to flakes and even entire sections of incense sticks, create wonderfully vibrant surfaces that tempt the viewer to touch them. But working with ash poses a logistical problem: It can’t be flicked onto an upright surface. So the canvases instead lie on the warehouse floor, and the artist’s assistants lean over or sit above them on elongated dollies, dipping brushes into what look like oversize pillboxes—the ash painter’s palette.

Resting against the wall in the back is Zhang’s largest ash painting to date, a 35-by-9-foot epic depicting hundreds of workers creating a channel to bring water to the interior of China as part of the midcentury Great Leap Forward. “China right now is going through something like this. People are showing tremendous ability to overcome nature and do the impossible,” Zhang says. “Back in those days, it was done for survival. Now it’s for affluence.” The artist says he’s had collectors interested in the piece, but “it is for a museum only.”

The theme of challenge resonates with Zhang. He is used to—indeed disposed to—pushing the limits, often with little, if any, public display of emotion. His stoicism falls away, however, as he recalls an event that took place this past summer, during his monthlong journey on the Silk Road in China.

He and a friend were driving through the mountains when they encountered a sandstorm. Rocks were falling, they couldn’t see, and they had just passed a sign saying something to the effect of “Proceed at your own risk—you may die.” He thought that this might be the end. Then a smattering of village lights emerged from the darkness. Zhang’s face glows at the memory. “When you’re driving through the mountains, you meet challenge after challenge,” he says. “But then, after a while, you see the light.”

"In the Studio: Zhang Huan" comes to ARTINFO from the December 2007 issue of Art & Auction magazine.