"Straddling East and West".

"STRADDLING EAST AND WEST" by David Carrier The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York NY September 15, 2007 * February 10, 2008

"ZHANG HUAN: ALTERED STATES STATES" Asia Society, New York NY September 6, 2007 * January 20, 2008

Lin Yutang (1895-1976), the son of a Presbyterian minister, grew up in imperial China, was engaged in the struggles leading to the birth of the Republic in 1919, and then studied at Harvard and Leipzig Universities before returning to teach in Beijing. In 1936 he moved to New York, where during WWII he wrote much-praised books about Chinese culture, supported the war effort, and promoted displays of his country's art. Late in life, Yutang retired to Taiwan. Like many traditional Chinese writers, he made art himself. And he collected paintings and calligraphy. In the early twentieth century, many ambitious Chinese art students studied abroad, some returning to paint Western-style oil paintings. But Yutang's artists use ink on hanging paper scrolls. Xu Beihong's Heavenly Horse (1942) depicts a magnificent animal, but foreshortened as in a European picture. And Qi Baishi's Five Crabs (1950), which is a masterpiece, is painted on a traditional narrow tall scroll. Pu Ru's Wandering in a Cloud-Filled Valley (ca. 1950) shows ancient pines beneath script in the style of Mi Fu (1051-1107). The washes of layered ink in Zhang Daqian's Mountains Clearing after Rain (1965-70) are obviously influenced by contemporary Western abstractions. But most of the art in Yutang's collection could, so it seems to me, have been made during the Ming dynasty. The catalogue for "Bridging East and West: The Chinese Diaspora and Lin Ytang" calls Zhao Shao'ang's Bamboo and Cicada (1966) a "daring composition" because it "frames a vertical section of a single stalk of bamboo without showing its root or tip," redoing a cliched subject in an original composition. How distant is the Chinese art world, and who knows what we who cannot read the calligraphy are missing?

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Born in 1965, just before the Cultural Revolution, Zhang Huan studied Western art history, Buddhist temple music, and Kurt Cobain's recordings before becoming a performance artist in the 1990s. He said: "The body is the only direct way through which I come to know society and society comes to know me." He was too poor to afford art materials. For 12 Square Meters (1994) he covered his naked body with honey and fish oil, and sat for an hour in a Beijing public latrine, covered with flies. His To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond (1997) used 46 migrant laborers for said purpose, but then Huan entered the water himself with the son of the fishpond's owner on his shoulders. Starting in 1996, he performed abroad. He was shocked to see Western paintings, for they looked very different from reproductions in books. In 1998, he relocated to New York. Pilgrimage--Wind and Water in New York (1998) is his bewildered response to our country. He walked through the courtyard of P.S.1/MoMA and stretched out on a Ming-dynasty-style bed with an ice mattress. Impressed with the way that Americans treat their dogs as family members, he surrounded himself with the spectators' pet dogs. In My New York (2002), he covered himself in raw steaks, which made him look like a bodybuilder, and strolled down Fifth Avenue handing out white doves to be released. After staging other performances with many participants elsewhere in the U.S., Australia, Europe, and Asia, Huan moved to Shanghai, and gave up performance art. Taken up by PaceWildenstein, he now makes sculptures, woodblocks, and paintings.

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"Zhang Huan: Altered States" at The Asia Society includes videos of a number of his performances, some of his large sculptures and woodcuts, and a film showing his current studio, which looks like a small factory. His catalogue essay, "A piece of nothing," shows his magnificent intelligence. Any American who has visited China knows how exotic everyday life seems. Huan returns the favor, showing how strange the West seems to a gifted Chinese artist. Contemporary Chinese art legitimately attracts attention in America partly because it helps us understand that country's traumatic political development. Huan's career seems to encapsulate the development of China in the past forty some years. When a fully encompassing history of art in the twentieth century is written, how will the development of painting in that country fit into the picture? The artists collected by Yutang used traditional media, as do, even today, some Chinese artists. But Huan started by imitating American-style performances common in the 1960s. Family Tree (2000) shows his face gradually being obscured with calligraphy, while fragments of antique sculpture he saw in Tibet inspire his gigantic Head fromBuddha Foot (2006). Huan thus uses Chinese subjects in a way that dramatically distinguishes him from his Western peers. In Yutang's lifetime, China moved from feudalism briefly to democracy, before turning to Maoism. And then in Huan's still short life, the country passed through the Cultural Revolution to become capitalist-minded. As China itself passed very rapidly through a political development that in Western Europe took several centuries to realize, so in its own great leap forward, art in China skipped very fast forward through modernism into performance art. Yutang's artists worked in conservative styles even during WWII, seeking to continue old Chinese traditions. When Huan started doing body performances, he imitated Americans. And his recent sculptures play with scale in not unfamiliar ways. The interesting transition will come soon, I predict, when in China artists create an autonomous visual culture, one that owes little to our influence. Then perhaps Western artists will look to Huan's country for inspiration.

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