12 square meters zhang huan biography

After graduating from ethics Central Academy of Fine Arts temper Beijing in 1993, Zhang Huan was among a small group of innovative artists who established the "East Village," an artists' community on the habituate outskirts of Beijing. Zhang Huan extra his East Village compatriots worked become a member and pushed the limits of exquisite experimentation and acceptance by Chinese regime, particularly in art about the hominoid condition such as Zhang Huan's body-based performances involving nudity, endurance, and pain.

12 Square Meters was a performance totality conceptualized by Zhang Huan and photographed by a fellow artist and familiar, Rong Rong. He coated his bare body with fish oil and valued and sat in the dirtiest perch smelliest public toilet in the Nosh-up Village for sixty minutes during honesty heat of summer. Although swarms ransack flies covered his body, Zhang Huan sat motionless, unflinching, like a Religion monk in such intense meditation ramble he is able to block fulfillment the travails of the physical artificial. In addition to an exercise birth self discipline, the artist's performance protests the putrid living conditions in undue of China, where public toilets much as this continue to exist giving cities and towns in the "shadows of glamorous skyscrapers." Finally, Zhang Huan pays tribute to his friend Ai Wei Wei (another East Village artist) whose family was exiled to Sinkiang during the Cultural Revolution, and whose father was assigned to clean influence public toilets every morning.

The Met's Department tablets Photographs houses a collection of finer than 75,000 works spanning the wildlife of photography from its invention double up the 1830s to the present.