Pace Gallery has opened a major exhibition of works by Zhang Huan at 125 Newbury in New York City, marking the artist’s first solo presentation in the city in over a decade. Titled Ash Paintings and Performances, the show revisits the artist’s influential practice while situating it within broader conversations around body, identity, and material transformation.
Revisiting performance as embodied language
The body has no limits, according to Zhang Huan. One of the most extreme names in Chinese contemporary art, Huan made his name through performances that, often shockingly, tested the physical and conceptual boundaries of human form to explore memory, labor, impermanence and resilience.
Curated by Arne Glimcher, the exhibition brings together previously unseen documentation of Zhang’s seminal performances from the 1990s and early 2000s. In addition, photographs, sculptures, and ash paintings extend the dialogue between ephemeral action and enduring material form. Consequently, the exhibition frames performance not only as an act but also as an archive of lived experience.
Born in Anyang in 1965, Zhang emerged from Beijing’s experimental art scene, including participation in the Beijing East Village. During this period, he developed works that foregrounded endurance and collective presence. In 1994, Zhang led one of the group’s most talked about works, “12 Square Meters,” where he sat naked in an outhouse, letting flies collect on his honey-covered body for hours.
Collective action and material transformation
While exploring the endurance of a single body, much of his oeuvre focused on poetic and ecologically involved expressions of collective action. Highlights at the Newbury show include “To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain” (1995), when he recruited a group to lay in a pile atop a mountain to temporarily “raise” its summit; and “In To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond” (1997), where a group of laborers came together to raise a pond by one meter.
Alongside these works, the exhibition foregrounds Zhang’s ash paintings, created from incense ash collected at Buddhist temples. As a result, these works translate ritual residue into textured, monochromatic surfaces that carry spiritual and cultural resonance. Furthermore, selections from the Memory Door series extend this material inquiry, linking personal history with collective memory.
New York context and enduring themes
Marking his first New York solo in over a decade, the exhibition also revisits the artist’s formative years in the city from 1998 to 2006. During this period, Zhang’s work increasingly engaged with themes of migration and cultural displacement. For instance, his 2002 performance at the Whitney Biennial, “My New York,” saw him walk through the city in a suit made of raw meat, confronting viewers with visceral questions of identity and human instinct.
“The body is the only direct way through which I come to know society and society comes to know me,” he once said. “The body is the proof of identity. The body is language.”
Ultimately, Ash Paintings and Performances positions Zhang Huan’s practice within an expanded framework that bridges performance, materiality, and social inquiry. Through its layered presentation, the exhibition underscores the continued relevance of his work in contemporary art discourse.
Zhang Huan: Ash Paintings and Performances is on view through April 4 at 125 Newbury, 395 Broadway, New York, NY.