Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei

“Amituofo” is the first solo exhibition in Taiwan for the internationally renowned artist Zhang Huan. Curated by Dr. Yang Shinyi (PhD Art History), the exhibition is organized into six categories and will take place simultaneously inside and outside the museum. The categories are: performance art, sculpture, installation, painting, opera and mixed-media works. The curator has meticulously selected over 30 artworks by Zhang Huan to represent his creative journey over the past decade, portraying the artist’s boundless creative energy, innovation and artistic wit. Performance – Individual Art
Zhang Huan was born in a farm village in Henan in 1965 and moved to Beijing to study painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in the ’90s. He later began to explore performance art with a group of avant-garde artists in the “East Village” of Beijing. They became the first group of internationally recognized Chinese performance artists. Among them, Zhang Huan’s artworks that challenge the physical body’s limits and push it to the extremes have particularly attracted international attention. In the following decade, Zhang Huan traveled around the world to execute his performance artworks. Although the performance pieces were all site-specific singular events, video documentation continues to carry a strong visual impact today. Issues such as existence and environment, emotion and will, body and spirit, and culture and communication stir up people’s interests and further speculation. The video documentation included in this exhibition consists of seven of Zhang’s most representational performance works. Factory – Collective Art
Upon Zhang Huan’s return to China in 2005, the biggest transformation creatively for him was the shift from his past “individualized art concept” to “conceptualized collective art production.” He established a large-scale “Art Factory” on a 34,000-square-meter piece of land and hired painters, sculptors, craftsmen and other professionals to work in the factory: In total there are close to a hundred staff members. With professional division of labor, quality control and constant developmental experimentation, the factory has well integrated trained artists with craftsmen, contemporary art with traditional craft, and avant-garde art concepts with manual production labor. Together, they mass-produce exclusive artworks with a personal style and brand power, and the works travel internationally to be exhibited in major museums around the world. The incense ash paintings and large-scale sculptural installations included in this exhibition are products of collaboration between members of this Art Factory and their interaction with Zhang Huan’s avant-garde concepts. Exhibition – Artistic Thread of Thought and Depth of Humanity
Zhang Huan’s artistic career is full of irony and controversy, as seen from his individualized expression through performance art to the collective Art Factory. He uses his body to express ideas and communicates with the world through his performance, and his works are used as ways to express his self-inspection and struggle. At the same time, within the framework of contemporary avant-garde art, he also attempts to incessantly interject his personal philosophy and cultural viewpoints on religion and faith, art and culture, society and politics, etc. In addition to the visual impact seen in “Amituofo” – Zhang Huan’s Solo Exhibition, audiences are also encouraged to speculate from the multiple perspectives the artist brings forth.