I've had five articles published in magazines this month. Unfortunately/fortunately none of them are the original versions. Editors, to make them fit and presumably fly, had edited them. Since I haven't been crazy about the directions and voice of this editorial flight I will use this here blog to publish the directors cut.The article below is based on my experience not only as long time collaborator of the artist, Zhang Huan but on my experience making the film Zhang Huan Studio- that is being shown at the Asia Society show- Altered States. A while back, before the exhibition opened, I put a short clip of the video on YouTube along with an earlier entry about Zhang's studio. But the Asia Society folks asked me to take it down as they wanted to be the ones to premiere the piece. I complied like a gentleman. Now a severely re-edited version of the video is up on YouTube via the Asia Society site and generously credits me- Thank you ASOC but the film only slightly resembles the original version and all the other stuff that is stuffed into it is done in a way that doesn’t represent me. Cest la vie The hegemonic dynamic of authorship and authoritarianism battle it out in the feeble sphere of blogland. The Asia Society is winning with over 8000 hits and I just sit and complain.
The article below also appears severely edited in December’s issue of Art in America. In Art in America’s version they use the word gewgaw, which is a word I would never, in my wildest poetry, use. Just for the record.“Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art” - Andy Warhol
China’s manufacturing industry is the largest in the world, employing more workers than all of the G-7 industrial countries combined. Midway down China’s eastern shore lays one of its fastest growing regions, the Yangtze River Delta. Surpassing all other regions in terms of economic growth, productivity and per capita income, the Delta boasts Shanghai, a city of 17 million, as its center. It is also home to what may be the largest artist’s studio on the planet.
Way out in Shanghai’s western suburbs, tucked behind a stretch of shanty noodle joints, shady massage parlors, and stores that sell a lot of circular plastic things lies Zhang Huan’s manufacturing empire. It is here that the tenets of Buddhism, mysticism and the global market congeal to produce one of the world’s top fine art brands. The scope of his enterprise is deceiving at first, but after a tour of his three complexes, Zhang Huan, whose reputation stems from a decade of performance art, will dramatically redefine the notion of artistic production for any visitor.
As you enter the east studio, workers, sitting cross-legged upon flat palettes, rock back and forth while rubbing huge sheets of hand-made paper with stones. Astonishing fourteen by twenty foot woodblock prints, laden with images culled from traditional medicinal texts, line the walls. In the next room, amidst flying woodchips, and a symphony of chainsaws and chisels, crews of traditional carvers bang into formation everything from reliefs on barn doors to free standing sculptures. Down the back alley, pass a friendly German Shepard, are two oil painting studios. Inside recent art school graduates, some on scaffolding, meticulously render insects onto mammoth canvases. These swarms of flies represent contemporary man’s misguided busyness; a series Zhang claims links back to his legendary “12sqm” performance. Another building houses an office where the studio’s accounts are kept, along with an array of Buddha figurines collected on visits to Tibet, heavy metal CDs and a bed lodged under a table where the boss takes his daily afternoon nap.
In between the east and west studios is another vacuous space dedicated to more printmaking. Reams of silk screens and etchings, from an unusually large, custom-made press, were likened by one visitor to a bank printing it’s own money.
After a dusty sprint down the road, past another line of shacks and a towering pink apartment complex, gates open onto the west studio. Inside a hangar lit by spot welders, workers piece together enormous (up to 10m high or 26m long) copper sculptures. These mangled figurations are modeled after the dismembered limbs of broken Buddha statues, relics from China’s torturous Cultural Revolution. In the connecting space, a woodshop busily produces the stretchers, scaffolding and crates necessary for the studio’s operations. In an oven shaped building next door a crew clad with dust masks sift, sort and craft everything from paintings to tremendous head sculptures out of the artist’s favorite material, incense ash. Zhang has contracted local Buddhist temples to supply him with their burnt offerings. The ash, Zhang claims, is imbued with millions of people’s dreams and wishes, certainly good stuff for the art world. Shipments arrive weekly as research and development continues to invent more and more uses for the sacred substance. A showroom, larger than most venues the artist actually exhibits in, is where the product line gets flaunted for clients and documented. The last stop for works in this assembly line is ironically a departing point for others. The crating and shipping warehouse doubles as storage. Here stacks of Styrofoam fight with Ming furniture, ancient barn doors and other raw materials that await their destiny as art objects.
It’s hard to say where the studio ends and the factory begins in this fractured 75,000 square foot labyrinth. It is certainly not Warhol’s factory, but rather a hybrid of antique market and late-capital industrialism run like a series of rituals by a retired performance artist. At first it was an issue of quality control. Zhang would hire foundries and studios for the fabrication of his work but could never fully oversee the process. So he brought the outsourcing under his own roof. Here he could collaborate with the fabricators, sometimes allowing them creative freedoms they never imagined before. From then the studio continued to grow, as did Zhang’s perpetual inspiration and financial means. It now employs anywhere from 80-100 people who descend from all over China. Additional specialists are often called in for particular projects. For instance earlier this year, after visiting a Halal slaughter-house, China’s premiere taxidermists were called in on a project that juxtaposed the artist’s own sculpted figure with the stuffed bodies of cows. A Yi-Jing master has also recently been hired to consult on the studio’s direction and works. But besides the hocus-pocus and improvisational nature of art making this enterprise is a factory in most senses of the word. It runs during normal business hours (punched in and out by each employee), houses the workers in dormitories and has a canteen that serves them 3 meals a day. It is a space that in both conception and practice requires strong leadership and business skills. Zhang Huan along with his confidant and studio director, Fang Wei never stop. Not only do they drum up new creative possibilities and refine existing ones but they also resolve arguments, hire and fire workers (due to the diverse appetites of the staff, the studio has seen 3 chefs come and go in the last year) and oversee the maintenance of these hulking edifices. However the real business takes place behind the scenes in Shanghai’s old French concession. From here Zhang Huan’s wife and business partner, Hu Junjun, coordinates, not only the studio’s sales, exhibitions and commissions, but a philanthropic organization funded by studio profits that is aimed at renovating rural schoolhouses.
But how did this performance artist whose studio for the longest time was, as the artist states, in his brain, turn into the 21st century Chinese incarnation of Andy Warhol? Zhang Huan’s story is actually very similar to the story of modern China: rapid economic development and cultural transformation in a short period of time. Going to NY in 1998 with a little underground fame, the clothes on his back, and a determination to succeed, Zhang Huan literally became the poster boy for Chinese contemporary art in the US when Asia Society’s Inside Out show donned his piece as their catalog cover and promotional image. During his six years in the US his performance documents, becoming more elaborate and expensive were fodder for smart investments. Imbued with an eclectic mix of iconography and drama, his performances in the West functioned as a sort of surrealist cultural diplomacy. “I took the 30-40 years of my internal culture on a road show…” In this global arena, after several tumultuous turns in NY’s gallery system, Zhang Huan became very attuned to the business of art. But it wasn’t until his return to China that an onslaught of inspiration, welling up from his childhood and beyond, became motivation for the studio. It is here that his enterprise has snowballed. It is only here, as Fang Wei states, “in China’s market place of cheap migrant labor, low cost real estate and materials that a phenomenon like this could ever happen”. Theatre projects, feature films, and animation projects seem to be on the horizon but as the studio’s parade of Buddhist objects keep selling the incense crews will remain sifting and sorting. After all good business is the best art.
Mathieu Borysevicz 10.2.06
