Zhang Huan: Kunstverein in Hamburg

ZHANG HUAN is perhaps best known for his performances and installations in the prestigious Art Fairs throughout the world. Writing about performance art can be a challenge but fortunately this monograph benefits from the informed minds of fine critics who for one of the few times make his art form intelligible to the reader. Zhang Huan is not only a performance artist, though there are few who equal his ingenuity and ever evolving finesse of that medium. He is also a fine painter, creating images from not only traditional materials, but also from incense ashes. His large sculptural works reference his Chinese home and inheritance. Among these are his enormous Buddha of Steel Life of Steel and Copper, Hero No.1 and Giant No.1 of Cowskin, Steel, Wood and Polystyrene Foam, and his Buddha leg, head, hand, and foot. Among the well known installations are the room of monumental Buddhas - both of steel and of ash, the latter being torn down as part of a performance, Canal Building 2008, Ash, Steel and Wood, and his inked faces and bodies both solo and in large groups, the groups at times standing on ground or partially submerged in water. His `Window' is both a performance and a photographic depiction of several encounters with a donkey in stages of man/animal intimacy. The very helpful articles in this beautifully designed monograph are by such luminaries as Yilmaz Dziewior, RoseLee Goldberg, Robert Storr and Zhang Huan himself. Though the cover of the book shows several aspects of this amazingly gifted artist's avenues of communication (given the shock value of the artist's image), the book itself is the finest publication yet on the variety of expression Zhang Huan is bringing to the art world. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, August 09