Friendship: a Short version. I met David Shadrack Smith in 1994 in Beijing. After a few circuitous passings we became good friends. Two New Yawkas in China whattayagonnado? Shortly afterwards we meet Zhang Huan, rough and tough performance artist. We all become close friends, navigating east and west, making art, chasing girls, BSing philosophy, consuming dumplings, and lots of alcohol. David is a television documentarian... I am/was too. We worked together occasionally. We made a film called "Instant Noodles" in which Zhang Huan and his, at the time girlfriend, now wife, Hu JunJun act as weary, post adolescent wanderers looking for true love or meaning or just a good meal... anyway Zhuang Hui, Cao WeiJun, GaoLing and a host of other art world characters also appear in the film. We had only had one professional actor but it still was a very sweet film, a cult classic if I may say so. In 1998 I move to NY then Zhang Huan and JunJun move to NY and then David... we stay for a long time in NY, nostalgic for the good ole days of Beijing's instant noodles but moving forward just the same. Now I am back, not in Beijing, but Shanghai as is Zhang Huan and JunJun. David comes and visits. Dan Wolfskehl has also just moved here. Dan is a friend from even further back. We went to SVA together. He was introduced to David and Zhang Huan when we just moved to NY in 98 or 99. Zhang Huan's second NY exhibition is a show that Dan and I curated called "canalogy". It doesn't appear it on his CV though. David and Dan bond like two good NYJews. Dan is an architect. He designs David's loft and after constant prodding from me, moves his young family to China, land of architectural salvation... or damnation depending on how you look at it. Dan may also work for Zhang Huan and JunJun who build schools for poor farm children- Gao An Foundation -as a matter of Buddhist altruism. David still likes Beijing better. Can't argue apples and oranges. David calls himself Shady and has a new production company that is doing a job for National Geographic TV. Zhang Huan has became an international art sensation. He has a tremendous studio on the outskirts of Shanghai. It employs over 80 people including his funny confidant, Fang Wei. We eat a proletariat lunch there. I have also worked for Nat Geo and I have also made films for Zhang Huan. This is a film I made about Zhang Huan's studio for Asia Society in January. It is a 10 minute excerpt of a 30 minute film. PLAY
More on Zhang Huan's studio:
Zhang Huan's notoriety stems from his early Beijing performance pieces in which the artist positioned his own body as a site of existential inquiry. After moving to NY in 1998, his performances in venues throughout the world were imbued with an eclectic mix of iconography and drama, functioning as a sort of surrealist cultural diplomacy. Two years ago the artist returned to China to live in Shanghai. His work has since taken a radical turn. For the past year and a half Zhang Huan has ceased doing performances and now is a full time studio artist. But his studio operation is far from traditional.
The outfit consists of two, 2500sqm, former clothing factories separated by a 5-minute drive through Shanghai’s rough, outer suburbs. The studio employs anywhere from 70-100 people at any given time. It houses the workers in dormitories and has a canteen that serves them 3 meals a day. There is a wood print studio that produces 14x20 ft unique prints, a wood carving studio where everything from reliefs and busts to free standing sculptures are the result of a collaboration between Zhang Huan and a crew of traditional Chinese woodcarvers from Dongyang, China; there are oil painting studios filled with recent art school graduates; a studio that hammers out enormous (up to two stories high, or 100m long) copper sculptures, and a division that is responsible for sifting, sorting and creating everything from paintings to tremendous head sculptures out of the artist’s favorite material, incense ash. The ash comes from several of Shanghai’s Buddhist temples, which the artist has contracted to supply him with the burnt offerings of their many devotees. After a recent visit to a Halal slaughter-house the studio is now working with China’s premiere taxidermist on a project that juxtaposes the artist’s own sculpted figure with the stuffed bodies of cows.
Besides running very much like a factory, with normal hours punched in by each employee, the studio has its own crating and shipping department, monthly birthday parties for the employees and department heads. The artists’ new materials - all recycled from antique markets, temples or demolished farmhouses in China’s hinterlands- speak to both the artist’s own childhood and to the sophistication of a learned, international art star. Broken Buddha statue relics, from China’s torturous Cultural Revolution, are now the inspiration for an artist whose entire career was founded on the most immediate, primal material, his own body. Buddhism, mysticism, tradition and the global market all collide in this artists’ diverse and tightly run factory. There is now talk that the artist and his directors will be joined by both a Yi-Jing master and traditional Chinese doctor to consult on the direction of the studio and its works.
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