Zhang Huan, Peace
July 2003 - April 2004

Zhang Huan's Peace elegantly stages several relationships: an artist's corporeal investment in his or her practice; the often spiritual rift between an immigrant's native and adopted cultures; and the role of the public in physically engaging an artwork. Resembling those in traditional Chinese temples, the bronze bell in Peace charts eight generations of Zhang Huan's ancestors, who are inscribed by name in Chinese characters on the bell's exterior. Beside the bell hangs a gilded cast of the artist's naked body — a surrogate for Zhang Huan himself — floating perpendicularly at chest height so that, when pushed, the figure's head sounds the bell. Both body and bell are framed and contained within an open-air, four posted steel structure, giving Peace a shrine-like quality.

The figure of the artist, which was cast directly from his body, has an intimate realism that includes goose bumps, the fine lines of the Achilles tendon, and raised veins from the artist's clenched fist. Without our intervention, the surrogate hangs statically, a hand's length from the bell. But pushing the figure by the side or feet we change from audience to participant, from spectator to accomplice. As the bell sounds and continues to resonate, Peace comes to life, radiating low tones and, through them, strata of the artist's history. The bell is a mnemonic for ritual and lineage and by striking it, Zhang Huan, a New York resident, is reunited with his native home and ancestry.

Peace tells Zhang Huan's story, and gestures towards that of the immigrant and the artist at large. James Joyce, who also lived in exile from his native country, reportedly stated, "hoc est corpus meum" (this is my body) upon receiving the first printed copy of Ulysses. Immigrating to a new country and expressing the experience artistically requires a certain objectivity or detached consciousness, which Zhang Huan implies in the distance between his surrogate and the bell, and the figure's ascetic rigidity. But Peace is also a testament to Joyce's notion of the total — and in Zhang Huan's case, literal — investment of the self in the making of art, and suggests an inherent detriment to an artist engaged in such immersive, even sacrificial, creative pursuits.

Peace summons us to complete the work of art and, in doing so, enact a confrontation between Zhang Huan's past and present lives. It may be that, through our participation, the artist reconciles this conflict, if only for the duration of the bell's resonance.

Claire Barliant