It shouldn’t be news when an artist turns to a medium as tried-and-true as oil painting. But when the artist is the daring shapeshifter Zhang Huan, and he’s chosen to render iconographic skull elements from Tibetan Buddhism after returning to his native China from New York, that’s a different story.
A New York Times preview of Huan’s upcoming solo exhibition at Manhattan’s Pace Gallery entitled “Poppy Fields” (Sept. 20 – Oct. 26) discusses how “Buddhism and death rituals have been abiding subjects for [him]” but didn’t provoke this latest creative outburst until a journey to the Land of Snows:
“In 2005, a trip to Tibet irrevocably altered Mr. Zhang’s thinking and his art making. ‘One day in Lhasa, I got up at 4 a.m. and went to the Jokhang Temple, the biggest one in Tibet, and I saw men and women already lining up for miles,’ Mr. Zhang said. He said he was amazed by the sight of pilgrims crawling to the site in the middle of traffic, in a seeming clash between modernity and ancient tradition. ‘I have been to the most famous museums in the world, and I have never seen a sight as striking as this,’ he said.
“He also witnessed the Tibetan sky burial, in which a monk eviscerates the human corpse, leaving the flesh as food for vultures and smashing the bones into a grainy dust. The process is supposed to liberate the spirit from the body for peaceful transport into the next life. ‘Most people, when they see this ceremony, think it is gross and they cannot bear to watch,’ Mr. Zhang said. ‘But, when I watch the ceremony, I feel this hallucination of happiness, and I feel free.’”
The Times piece also reveals how seriously Huan has incorporated Buddhist practice, which formed some of Huan’s earliest memories, and has now permeated his life:
“During the antireligious oppression of the Cultural Revolution, Mr. Zhang, born in 1965, remembers watching his grandmother go to the temple and burn incense before a statue of a Buddha. In his adulthood, he went regularly to temples; even after moving to New York in 1998, he studied every weekend with the venerated monk Sheng Yen at the Dharma Drum Mountain Center in Queens and later donated statues to the Chuang Yen Monastery, designed by I. M. Pei, in Kent, N.Y.”
Read the full article here, with a slide show of works from the “Poppy Fields” exhibition.
You can explore more about Zhang Huan’s life and work at the Pace Gallery website here, and Huan’s personal site here.
