Performance on the Blockchain: Zhang Huan and EchoX

Autor(en)

Freda Fiala

Abstrakt

In 2002, Chinese artist Zhang Huan crossed through New York’s streets wearing a bodysuit made of raw meat that shaped him with bulging contours and expanded his presence to into a humanoid, Hulk-like figure. By this time, it had been four years since Zhang left China. He had previously studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where he graduated in 1993. With personal identity and existential survival being his most pressing topics at the time, Zhang was able to exercise a radical, self-exploitative practice as a performance artist. In 2021, as part of a collaboration with the Taipei-based tech platform EchoX, Zhang created Celestial Burial of an Artist, a digital project that revisited Zhang’s meat-suit intervention My New York, his earlier work that now holds a firm position in the canon of performance art at the turn of the century. The two decades since Zhang’s original performance intervention have seen a trend towards score-based, multiscale practices, depending less on artists’ physical presence, and departing from extreme physical actions. Zhang’s artistic trajectory relates to the conceptualization of the performative, too, even though his practice has since focused on the creation of object-based works.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Theater-, Film- und Medienwissenschaft

Journal

PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art

Band

45

Seiten

24-34

Anzahl der Seiten

11

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1162/pajj_a_00679

Publikationsdatum

09-2023

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

604003 Aufführungspraxis, 604004 Bildende Kunst, 604029 Theaterwissenschaft, 604028 Tanzwissenschaft

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Music, Visual Arts and Performing Arts

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/1c2a3c18-8310-4b34-a6e8-66da77d2713a