Zhang Huan (b. 1965) is a contemporary Chinese artist, who built up a reputation following a number of high-profile performances staged in China and the USA.
In 2005, Zhang Huan established his studio in Shanghai. Later he turned to the creation of paintings and sculptures, many of which were closely associated with Chinese beliefs and traditions. He had a chance to rethink them while visiting China’s sacred sites, among them the unparalleled Dunhuang site, known as the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. A dedicated Buddhist and a connoisseur of Buddhist iconography, Zhang Huan turned the mystical and religious practice into the bedrock of his artwork. His unique ash paintings has injected new vitality into the art world.
Starting from the 2000s Zhang Huan embarked on large-scale sculptures, producing monumental Buddha statues from a vast array of materials: wood, clay, hide and copper. With the help of copper, he makes a fanciful combination of a variety of figured elements, bringing back together ‘thirty-two signs of a great man’: immense torso, properly shaped hands and feet, convex body parts, golden-hued body, rounded wrists, Ushnisha on the head, eyelashes like an ox etc. We can also trace eighty minor characteristics of the Buddha’s physical appearance: long and broad hands, well-proportioned fingers, copper-coloured fingernails and toenails, large eyes, soft eyebrows, broad forehead etc.
As the Cultural Revolution unfolded in China (1966-1976), countless Buddhist temples and monasteries were destroyed, Buddha statues smashed. With a renewed interest in the country’s traditional culture, these fragments are carefully retrieved from under the ground, cleaned and returned to the altars; one sculpture would be sometimes pieced together from the remains of several others. Since 2005, Zhang Huan had been making regular pilgrimages to Tibetan temples, sacred mountains and lakes, to worship celestial burial masters. The inspiration of Hermitage Buddha came from the fragments of Buddha statues that he collected from Tibet. What Zhang Huan sees behind the creation of his artwork is a mystical ritual of concentrated emergence and a call for the expression of the spirit through the body. The image of the Hermitage Buddha as a giant mythical beast from outer space, which subverts reality, concentrates the conflict of beliefs. According to the artist, “Hermitage Buddha demonstrates the animal state of human nature. One leg of the beast steps on a human head, which wants to arch out of the eighteen layers of hell and come to the world from the netherworld. It is a kind of contradiction, a duel to prevent human beings from coming back to Heaven.”
The display of the Hermitage Buddha in the courtyard of the Winter Palace is tied to the exhibition of the artist’s work, staged in the Nicholas Hall from 9 September to 8 November 2020.
