Zhang Huan, Weihong and Zhang Jian-Jun at DiverseWorks and Barbara Davis

Art in America, Feb, 2004 by Richard Vine

Need confirmation that contemporary Chinese art is steadily gaining ground in U.S. minds and markets? Look no further than this recent three-person, dual-venue exhibition in the heart of Bush Country.

At the venerable DiverseWorks alternative space, a converted cotton warehouse, all three artists selected by visual-arts director Diane Barber showed major new works. The best-known participant, 38-year-old Zhang Huan, now resident in New York, has previously engaged in nude performances in which he was suspended by chains from his studio ceiling, sat in an outhouse with his body covered with fish oil and honey, or lay on a block of ice surrounded by tethered dogs. Here, naked once more, he clambered on a stone horse and various Oriental-motif carvings, before subjecting himself to a bizarre "Chinese medicine" procedure. Perching on a stepladder, he wriggled into an enormously oversized dress. From a tray, three young "nurses" then presented him with flaming glass tubes to be stuck to his flesh, where the vacuum caused by the extinguishing filaments would presumably draw out bad ch'i. From each tube ran a long string tied to the foot of a fluttering pigeon. Had the tubes stuck, rather than crashing to the floor of the auditorium while half the pigeons escaped into the light grid overhead, the effect would no doubt have been visually stunning. Even in its imperfect form, however, Buddhist Relics served as a powerful metaphor for the bare, essential self "clothed," for better or for worse, by culturally specific ministrations and ceremonies.

Weihong, 38, an eight-year resident of Houston, offered a real-life Ping-Pong match, with accompanying video projections of the players, in which all the elements--room, tables, balls, uniforms, paddles--were either black or white, or split half-and-half between the two. Though primarily an update of traditional yin-yang cosmology, the piece also had echoes of Nixon-era diplomacy--a one-world theme reinforced by a three-screen Web-site kiosk showing excerpts from an earlier performance in which the emigre artist served tea to scores of Houston gallery visitors.

A decade older than his compatriots, Zhang Jian-Jun, who divides his time between New York and his native Shanghai, showed two high-concept projects. The first, 2000 Years in Motion (2003), consists of three silicone rubber columns, ranging from 74 to 94 inches in height, on motorized scootboards. At the top of each lumpy, twisted, modernist column--their shapes playing off historical Western prototypes identified in photos on the gallery walls--sits a securely adhered antique Chinese vessel. As a subtle commentary on cultural fusion, these tall hybrid forms, engaged in a slow-motion bumper-car dance, show great resiliency--bouncing harmlessly off each other and the surrounding walls when contact is made. In Zhang's other work, dozens of photographs each with his slight, added-on alterations in pigment--record the favorite locales of Houston art-world notables. Over decades, the deliberately light-exposed photographic images will fade away (like many of the places themselves), leaving only the mark of the artist's hand--and Zhang's call for collectors to engage a fresh generation of artists in making new work from the remains.

The Barbara Davis Gallery, temporarily situated at the top of a high-rise hotel with sweeping views of the city, provided an environmental corollary to this artistic trio's farsighted themes. The show's mix of earlier and current work featured Zhang Huan's videos of celebrated performance pieces like To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain (1995) and My America (2000), Weihong's installation of diaristic color photographs cut and pasted into elegant band arrangements on the walls, and Zhang Jian-Jun's sumi-ink abstractions and his oversized "scholar's rocks" in silicone rubber. In both venues, these three artists, all graduates of some of China's foremost academies, demonstrated the combination of historical awareness and imaginative newness that is the hallmark of the most vital art new emerging from the People's Republic.