New BPC Installation Rings True for Artist

 by Barbara Aria

The massive bronze bell was in place, suspended from a steel frame like the classic temple bells of Buddhist China. But the other half of Zhang Huan’s Peace, which was being installed late last month in Battery Park City, was still at the gilder, its gold leaf drying. It is the life-size cast of the artist’s naked body, which doubles as a hammer that viewers can use to sound the bell.

Huan, whom the Trib spoke to late last month on the site of his installation at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel plaza, was taking things in his stride. He’s dealt with delays before. When an earlier edition of Peace was installed in Toronto, Huan said, the show opened before the body was finished, and so he suspended himself in its place and let his own head be slammed into the bell.
Zhang Huan stands with his sculpture Peace, installed last month in the plaza of Battery Park City's Ritz Carlton Hotel. He will perform with the piece on Oct.7. Photo by Stephanie Keith

For him, it was a natural solution: As an artist in China, from where he emigrated five years ago, Huan was celebrated by some peers and rejected by the establishment for a type of performance art that, like the work of Chris Burden and other ’70s American conceptualists, revolved around self-imposed bodily ordeals.

But not anymore, said Huan. “Change is life,” he explained. “Life changes, art changes.” Since his move to this ephemeral city, he has begun to want permanence. “With a performance, once the moment is finished, I only could see the photo or video of it. Now, I want to keep the moment for a long time.”


The artist is planning a performance piece at the installation, on Oct. 7. He said that it will involve himself, a group of Shaolin monks and, possibly, a flock of doves;

Huan was still working on the idea, but said that it would be unlike his previous performances.

Peace, a project sponsored by the public-art nonprofit Creative Time as part of its Art on the Plaza series (the work will be in place through April, 2004), has a serene elegance that stands in sharp contrast to the artist’s earlier work, whose harsh and immediate quality reflected the experience of living in a poor section of Beijing dubbed the “East Village” by local artists. One of his best-known works, 12 Square Meters, involved his sitting naked in a filthy latrine, covered in honey. Soon, flies were crawling all over him. Today, 24-karat gold replaces the honey-and-fly coating.

“When I moved to New York, I saw that gold is very important. Everybody needs gold,” said Huan, for whom gold represents the now. “The body is shiny and golden and new—it’s New York, the human. The bell is family, country, the world.”

Inscribed on the outer surface of the bell are the names of eight generations of Huan’s family members, all from the same village in central China where he was born and raised. Swinging the golden body into the bell produces a low, long sound—at close range, it can be heard for almost five minutes—that, said Huan, represents the collision of old and new and, for him, the voices of his ancestors.

“I want to hear what the family says,” he explained.

Hearing Huan speak, it seems as if Peace comes, in part, from his struggles acclimatizing to New York. “It’s getting harder, not easier,” he said. “In China, I stand on the land. Here, I’m not really part of the land.”

Surrounded by the inexplicable and new, he appears to find firm ground in his native cultural traditions, including Buddhism.

“This spring, I visited a temple on a mountain in China where people can strike the bell nine times,” Huan said. “Before swinging the hammer, you make a wish for the future. For me, peace is a very important dream.”