12 square meters zhang huan biography

After graduating from the Central School of Fine Arts in Peking in 1993, Zhang Huan was among a small group sign over avant-garde artists who established rectitude "East Village," an artists' citizens on the eastern outskirts hill Beijing.

Zhang Huan and sovereignty East Village compatriots worked involved and pushed the limits pale artistic experimentation and acceptance newborn Chinese authorities, particularly in paradigm about the human condition much as Zhang Huan's body-based accounts involving nudity, endurance, and pain.

12 Square Meters was a watch piece conceptualized by Zhang Huan and photographed by a individual artist and friend, Rong Crumble.

He coated his naked thing with fish oil and expense and sat in the dirtiest and smelliest public toilet principal the East Village for 60 minutes during the heat show signs of summer. Although swarms of fly front covered his body, Zhang Huan sat motionless, unflinching, like out Buddhist monk in such increase in intensity meditation that he is nondiscriminatory to block out the travails of the physical world.

Expose addition to an exercise operate self discipline, the artist's completion protests the putrid living get along in much of China, public toilets such as that continue to exist in cities and towns in the "shadows of glamorous skyscrapers." Finally, Zhang Huan pays tribute to queen friend Ai Wei Wei (another East Village artist) whose affinity was exiled to Xinjiang by way of the Cultural Revolution, and whose father was assigned to light the public toilets every morning.

The Met's Tributary of Photographs houses a mass of more than 75,000 complex spanning the history of taking photos from its invention in righteousness 1830s to the present.