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| An Experiment in Contemporary Art Creation's Mechanism--Wu Hung VS Zhang Huan |
| By Wu Hung |
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 ditorial Note: The following interview is an excerpt from Wu Hung's dialogues at Shanghai with Zhang Huan. The whole dialogues will appear in the book “Zhang Huan Studio: Art and Labor”, which will be published by Guangxi Normal University Press. Taking Zhang Huan Studio as a case, this book explored into a very widespread and quite controversial issue in contemporary art creations, i.e., the relationship between artists' individual creativity and the collective art production. Covering the first-hand materials written by Zhang Huan himself and all members in his studio, this book provided an important source for the research into this issue. Currently, Zhang Huan is cooperating with Wu Hung in preparations for his exhibitions scheduled to occur at Today Art Museum and Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in September of 2009. This interview may help readers understand Zhang Huan's current ideas on art creation and art mechanism.
Zhang Huan's Art Creation Turnaround
Wu Hung: We haven't had a face-to-face talk about your art for quite a few years - ever since you went to New York, you know.
Zhang Huan: It's in 1999 I'd exhibited in one of the exhibitions you planned (i.e. A Twinkling Moment exhibition held in Smart Art Museum); after that I've never found a chance to cooperate with you.
Wu Hung: In my memory, you did quite a lot performance art after you first got to America; but later you started to change and changed to sculpture and picture.
Zhang Huan: Yes. Between the year 2000 and 2002 I came back occasionaly and began to do some sculpture, which I entrusted mainly to workshops. However, I couldn't come back too often a year. Though I'd sent the sketch drawings, models, norms, materials and requirements to the workshop, I would find what they'd made falling short of my expectations the moment the product was brought to me. Then there's the trouble: the work was done, but it's not completely what I wanted. That had prompted me to believe I should set up a workshop of my own, and if so, I could work with my workers every day.
Wu Hung: So your change took place mainly in the years between 2000 and 2002?
 Zhang Huan: Yes, I began to develop such a feeling at that time.
Wu Hung: Were those several sculptures modeled on your own body created during that time?
Zhang Huan: Yes. They're my earliest sculptures.
Wu Hung: Do they include the one which strikes his head against the bell (that is, The Peace Bell)?
Zhang Huan: Yes. That one was made in 2001.
Wu Hung: Is it your earliest sculptural work?
Zhang Huan: Not yet. My earliest is called “Rubens”; it's a golden man with many hands, and it's a part of the performance conducted in Belgium. That performance was just called “Rubens”, and we accomplished it in a church. Like in a drama, I asked all collectors of my works to participate in the performance; each of them held a big pottery basin, wore clothes in Rubens' times and knelt down on the ground. Then I copy-made their hands: bankers have money-counting hands, some have hands with a fucking posture, and different people have different hands. They all knelt down on the ground, in a posture like that of Qin Hui. It's a scene in the performance. My idea came from Rubens' painting The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus: to loot with hands, and I took a fancy to Rubens, hence such an idea. In the performance there were still over a dozen horses racing to and fro, like a drama. At that time I didn't expect there had been so many collectors of my works, and in so small a place there had emerged several dozen people all at once, including curator Jan Hoot and a bishop of a church.
Wu Hung: It seems this work has never been exhibited in our country.
Zhang Huan: Maybe it's an earlier work, and it's the earliest source for my sculpture. Because one part of the performance was for me to duplicate their hands, these hands then had a relationship with my own body. Were those hands, including the curator's, pushing me forward or robbing me? In a word, there's a delicate relationship, and then there's the later Peace Bell and others. My early sculptures, namely those created between the year 2000 and 2005, were mostly related to my performance works and directly related to my body.
Wu Hung: Yes, those sculptures look like they're performing on your behalf.
Zhang Huan: So some guy even asked me, in that Peace Bell work I was painted golden, they wondered how many times I'd struck against the bell. They thought it's indeed I my person there!
Wu Hung: Is that work the size of the original? It looks smaller than your actual stature.
Zhang Huan: It's the size of the original. Man wears clothes after all! But man was indeed all-naked in his earliest times, and he's just of that size.
 Wu Hung: There's still the sculpture on the top of a car (refer to Keep Rooting); as you said, it related to performance too. But after that you seemed to be going out of performance gradually, didn't you?
Zhang Huan: After year 2000 I came back to China often; though I kept doing sculpture, most of the time I was doing performance, and I was creating on all my tours. After I came back in China, I felt strongly at what I saw here. When I would conduct a performance in other countries, it's often the case when I got off the plane I still had not worked out the idea of the performance; I would be so worried - how I should explain to the art gallery? Performance exerts too great a pressure on artists; he wouldn't perform poor and he wants to make a breakthrough every time, so it would be quite difficult. Then after staying overseas 8 years I came back and would begin a new process of understanding and judging.
Wu Hung: You stayed in America 8 years altogether?
Zhang Huan: Yeah. From 1998 till late 2005.
Wu Hung: But actually you already came back frequently before 2005 and started to get in touch with China again.
Zhang Huan: Sure. Mostly for some projects and for making sculptues and some other things, and I went to do them in places like Shanghai,  Shandong and Hebei. I suddenly had a flood of ideas and wanted to make all of them a reality. Then I rented a house and wanted to realize those ideas. I didn't care who would see those things or whether they'd like it or not; I would care about it the least bit. Before I came back, I had solved my basic livelihood problems; then I could do what I like freely. I didn't care if others like it or not, or if anyone would exhibit my works or not; if no one would, I would kept them ten years. With such a mind I would feel totally free. Thus, some people might see my works a bit “relaxed and looser”, unlike my previous“tight” style. Maybe you also felt like this today when you visited my studio.
Wu Hung: I wonder if it's “relaxed” or not; I sensed some kind of multifacetedness of your creation direction more.
Zhang Huan: Yeah, multiple tentacles.
Wu Hung: Actually, most of your works still give people a sense of “tightness”, that is, a higher intensity. The question is, all at once you hit upon so many ideas and dozens of them were going on in parallel, do you think you had a commanding idea or feel or not? Are there any common elements in all those plans?
Zhang Huan: Presumably there should be. For example, the materials I used were basically thrown-away stuff, like the door planks, the incense ashes, they're all discarded, simple and primitive stuff.
Wu Hung: Why did you choose those materials? Simply because you like it?
Zhang Huan: Like what we'd talked about before, I believe it also has something to do with my life experiences - my boyhood's rural village life. The sight of a straw chopper might immediately arouse a feeling in me because I'd used such things before. When seeing bulls and donkeys, I would have a hearty feel and a sense of touching them because as a boy I would ride a bull almost everyday and also chased a donkey and was kicked by it. In the suburbs of Shanghai there're dozens of huge sheds where second-hand stuff are sold, and there you can find whatever you want. There I saw a straw chopper and took a fancy to it; I told the shopkeeper I would buy a thousand such choppers and he went out for them immediately. They have a sales network and a phone call would have the stuff brought to you. Like those old carts' wooden wheels you saw in my studio, I phoned them at noon saying I need over a dozen such wheels, which, in only three hours, had been brought to my studio - very fast and convenient
Wu Hung: I guess, you like these shabby and abandoned stuff, because they look familiar and also because they embody a sense of time.
Zhang Huan: Yes. When I see them I feel they're very beautiful themselves and contain quite a sense of history.
 Wu Hung: A heavyweight western theorist says time is represented by material and changes the value of material carrier simultaneously. For example, put a new sheet of white paper and a sheet of yellowed paper together, though the white paper has no words in it, it has the“time” element in it and thus has a different value. The point you just explained is of vital importance to an understanding of your current works, that is, the issue about materials, the issue about uses of abandoned materials. Apart from these, any other common elements shared by your current so many projects?
Zhang Huan: Another common element is, they're all related to body; they're either about body or about skin. For example, a little insect's body, bodies depicted by wood carvings, the bust and thighs depicted by incense ash, carved bronze limbs, etc. are all related to body and skin.
Wu Hung: Actually, materials like incense ash are themselves quite spiritual; we can say they're not quite pure materials.
Zhang Huan: You're right. As for incense ash, apart from its use when one vows and worships, it can still be used as a medicine. So I believe the power of incense ash could bring the dead back to life and also ruin one's life. This is our idea of incense ash. It's no longer the ash, nor the material; it contains a kind of soul, a collective memory, collective creation and collective prayer. No one would curse others while burning incense in a temple, so they might all be praying and wishing for prosperity, high position and long life.
Wu Hung: So we can say it's a carrier of hope. Yes, the wording “a carrier of hope” is not bad.
Zhang Huan: It carries us and flies upward.
Wu Hung: Yes, because hope is rather illusory a thing, it must secure a carrier to reside in.
Zhang Huan: Nowadays in a temple, incense ash is thrown away or buried as rubbish. We collect incense ash and solidify it; it's solidification of souls. We use such solidified incense ash to paint pictures of historical figures, such as Zhang Xueliang, which will make us reflect upon history in a new dimension.
Wu Hung: It's a profound abstraction but also quite concrete; it relies on actual images, that is, painting based on old photos, and most of the photos were taken in revolutionary times.
 Zhang Huan: After seeing many pictures I still find this kind most touching.
Wu Hung: Why? The contents in these pictures are by no means life experience of your own. Maybe you once saw these historical pictures somewhere in your life?
Zhang Huan: Yes. Other things cannot move me and touch my heart. The various abstract words and concepts cannot touch my heartstring; only this can move me. Moreover, when I use this peculiar incense ash to express, I feel quite wonderful and comfortable.
Wu Hung: I think it might be some emotional complex, and I wonder if you have it or not. Sometimes I have no idea why we have such a complex, a complex toward photo pictures in socialist times. There seems to be a paradox here: on the one hand, we attach particular importance to individual independence, but on the other, we could be fairly moved at sight of the things of collectivism. Take you as an example: when you started out on your career, you gave us a radical rebel image, then why should such collective consciousness and collective things move you? Why wouldn't you go against it? And why would you retreat back to it?
Zhang Huan: That's too unique a part of history; it's the times we have all gone through. For me, it might also be a new process of understanding. Financial Times brought out an article, the main point of which was “Looking Back At China”. It could also be interpreted as: the whole China is running forward, but we're looking back at China.
Wu Hung: Some western art critics might remark immediately this kind of art has employed the Cultural Revolution images, and it's an “irony”. In fact I don't think it's the case. Of course someone put images of Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution in their paintings, with a purpose to solicit foreigners' attention; but we should by no means lump all of them together - in fact, lots of them are not irony. As you said, it's a personal emotional complex, and artists feel a need to reflect upon history. So your use of incense ash could be seen as a very unique personal approach.
Zhang Huan: Just now I mentioned Zhang Xueliang. All of us know his story, and I once visited his cemetery in Hawaii - he died in Hawaii at the age of 94. Recently we've watched China Revolution, a six-hour documentary, in which we could see genuine images of Zhang Xueliang and Chiang Kai-shek before Xi'an Incident, photos of Zhang Xueliang at that time and photos of his senior years. The sight of different life stages' images of his person aroused complex feelings in me. Such interesting pictures! He turned out to be such a warlord rascal, without least bit of the air of dignity; then, he ended up an old and clumsy man like that. The changes of a man's whole life were displayed, only to make us sigh in sorrow.
Wu Hung: It seems you've grown more mature and more history-conscious now as your age increases. What you said just now was the very sense of history, even something of your uneasy feeling about an ever-changing human affairs, while in the past you left us an impression of an extremely  intense and suppressive suffering. It seems this suffering has dissolved into other things now. Is it so?
Zhang Huan: It's dissolved into another sort of suffering. As in today's situation, so many works, so many projects are under way, it's also a great suffering. This suffering is a strain of brain to extremity: in a single day there might arise a dozen problems for you to solve, then cope with it or not? Every day you have to make such decisions. For example, I had four meetings yesterday, two about the PR firm and two about the design of a painting album.
Wu Hung: It might not be a “suffering” but be some extremely intense work. There's some particular intensity in your previous works too, but that's some condensed thing. Including your earliest performance works, they're all highly condensed things, like some small-sized but huge-weighted things, or like some metal of extreme gravity or a white dwarf in the universe. Though your present works still show such a sense of weight, they're not completely condensed but are open and unbound.
Zhang Huan: So it might be. It's now converted into many art plans going on in parallel.
Art Creation Style
Wu Hung: At this point we could now turn to the specific problems of art creations, that is, how your so many new ideas and new plans are concretely realized. When I visited your studio I saw quite a few workshops where your workers were busy at different works. Is that kind of working style a new form of art creation, namely, an art studio is set up centering upon a distinguished artist? Now many artists are hiring workers, but you do it in such a grand scale and aim to train a working staff as well create works, is it a new form in your opinion? When I talked with you on the phone we've discussed it so much, and I began to believe the phenomenon of “studio” itself do have something to do with contemporary art, and it's quite interesting a subject.
Zhang Huan: Sure. I'd said to you on the phone you must come and have a look; without your personal witness of it I could find no way to describe it fully to you.
Wu Hung: The scale of your studio does go beyond common people's imagination, and it's beyond foreigners' imagination even more. Though  artists like Richard Serra or Jeff Koons used factories or workshops to produce works to, their actual operations differed greatly. Like Jeff Koons who sent his designs out to the best firms he chose, which realize his designs fully according to his requirements, and that's unlike the style you adopted here.
Zhang Huan: Some folk artisans in our studio don't know what's good and what's bad, when to end or when to continue; they're not clear about these. But for the whole studio - regardless of which kind of work or which space - I feel, after I tell them what I want at the beginning, it's often they who're guiding me forward in the after processes. For example, in an exhibition at Asia Society Museum in New York, a carved bronze Buddha you see has a hollow arch of foot. Because when my workers were making that Buddha foot one evening, they believed it unsatisfactory, so they opened its foot arch and planned to fix it the following day. I happened to open the door and saw that had a very good effect; it's the state of that open arch I felt wonderful. Then I woke them up and had a meeting and I said “stop here”. They're all too happy - having planned to take trouble to make a new one, now they could stop and thus finish the work. That case shows, in the studio it's they who're guiding me; it's an interaction between they and me.
Wu Hung: But those young people are not very clear about the content of the interaction.
Zhang Huan: No, they're not.
Wu Hung: It's a coincidence.
Zhang Huan: They planned to open and then fix it; I was to open it and let it be.
The Artist and His Team
Wu Hung: From above talk I feel the relationship between an artist and his team is the key to an understanding of such an operation. Large-scale production is a widespread phenomenon in contemporary art, but it's also a subject we try to shy away from. As a result, artists are always evading it and outsiders wouldn't forgive. I believe you're right; we should make it known to the public and have it discussed as a serious academic subject.
Zhang Huan: Like this door plank carving, I call it “memory door”; first I selected a picture from old magazines and magnified it with silk-screen printing; when I saw the amplified screen print, I felt it had changed beyond my first impression; then when I marked out on the draft paper which part  was to be carved and which part wasn't, it's hard to imagine what would be the final outcome; so actually I was expecting something. Like with incense ash painting, I'd have a different feel after I'd painted it, and spreading it over the ground would produce a different effect from that of setting it upright on a wall, and the dried ashy color also differs from the wet gray color. So every morning when I went to see it I would be expectant, wondering what this “child” would be like after its birth.
Wu Hung: So the whole judgment would be for you to pass?
Zhang Huan: I would make judgment on every piece.
Wu Hung: And the original idea also belongs to you?
Zhang Huan: Yes.
Wu Hung: In general, what you decide are first of all two points: the starting point and the ending point, and these two points are in your control.
Zhang Huan: Yes, they're in my control. But every member in our team, our chief producer and chief supervisor will all give me their ideas; once we reach a consensus we start to work. I would listen to many people's ideas; if it's about art creation, I would listen to any worker's advice.
The Authorship Issue
 Wu Hung: There should be many people coming to visit your studio? Are there any curators, exhibition planners, critics and the like? How're their reactions to this kind of art creation style? They must have reacted to it very strongly? Do they have any reactions to this kind of mechanism of studio operation?
Zhang Huan: Outside reactions? They're positive. After news of this studio spread out, throngs of people come to see it, and even travel firms would phone us saying they want to take foreign art people to visit it - they regarded it as a tourist spot. Now we often turn down these requests. But at the first beginning we didn't refuse and would investigate which art museum they're from first, then several dozen of them took a bus here. But some people say it's dangerous to do art like this - so large a scale, how could you manage it on your own? If you do it all alone, how much could you sleep a day?
Wu Hung: I guess that would be the common reaction; including western exhibition planners, they would react like this. How did you respond to them?
 Zhang Huan: I said, as an artist I wouldn't concentrate on a single thing all the way till my death. I wish one hundred artists were creating in my works; this is my dream.
Wu Hung: You mean your works are created by different artists?
Zhang Huan: No, I hope viewers would feel as if one hundred artists are creating when they view my works; there should be one hundred different styles of my works.
Wu Hung: Like Monkey King who can change into seventy-two different guises, all sorts of. But critics could also refute that the style change you talk about are not yours but a thing involving many other people's efforts. Say, Picasso's works are of various sorts of styles, which, however, are not the sorts you're talking about; his remains a single artist's different styles at different time periods, so it's different from your sorts.
Zhang Huan: My case is several projects going on simultaneously. Moreover, I would change greatly, change far beyond ordinary people's imagination; in two years I may become totally different. I would try constant breakthroughs and self-changes.
Wu Hung: So many things you want to do, but you can't accomplish them all on your own.
 Zhang Huan: Sure, I can't. So I can only rely on collective strength, collective wisdom and collective memories.
Wu Hung: It's quite persuasive, but the critics' question is sharp too, and it may not necessarily have an immediate and satisfactory answer. More directly, since these things are not carved by you, how could they be counted as your works? How would you respond to this?
Zhang Huan: The ideas are mine. How works are made, how many assistants are there and how many works are produced, all these matter little; what counts is the result, and works themselves could tell.
Wu Hung: So it's still conceptual art.
Zhang Huan: And I would ask: did you ever see any kind of such woodcuts in any art museum? And any of such incense ash paintings in any museum around the globe? No, you never!
Wu Hung: So the form is not necessarily the form of a conceptual art, but in actual operations it's the concept of conceptual art. The authorship, plainly speaking, is the issue of the author's “label” at an exhibition. I guess those questioners are targeting at the wording of this label instead of at the power of your work. Perhaps because American ideas are more democratic - of course that democracy is sometimes very hypocritical - those people are thinking: these workers and art people are working here, but finally their names are nowhere to be found, why, they would ask. It's like we're watching a movie; after the movie there are rows of names, where we could even spot a waiter's name, though no one would care, it's still listed there. However, you don't have such a mechanism.
 Zhang Huan: When my workers come to work for me, they should first sign a declaration, declaring all the things in the studio, from the draft all the way to the final work, all their copyrights belong to me. They must sign it the moment they come; signing it then there would be no trouble with the copyright now.
Wu Hung: It's a legal procedure.
Zhang Huan: What matters most remains what you've talked about just now, that is, from the starting idea till the final “stop”, who's in control of these two points; it's the key. Without these two points, how excellent your work may be has nothing to do with me; the thing I don't like I wouldn't take it.
Wu Hung: Is it possible we find a way to show other workers' roles in your works? Not necessarily in an artist's identity but to show their contributions in technical and operational aspects, to show them in a quite clear fashion?
Zhang Huan: Then, on a door plank carving, we can mark it like this: “Author: Zhang Huan”, “Major Engraver: Hu XX”, “Buffer: XXX”, and so on.
Wu Hung: Yes. I believe this would be better; we need to be objective, and it's fairly clear, with a matter-of-fact definition of an art work. There  have been too many disputes over the authorship of art works in art history, which usually involve the issue of authentications. Take Rembrandt's works for instance, he has numerous works under his name and we could spot a clear difference in them at first sight, but we can't immediately distinguish them between true and false. Once an authoritative team of experts was organized and three different sorts of Rembrandt works were identified: one sort was believed to be painted by Rembrandt's own hand but whether it's wholly created by him or not remains uncertain, probably he painted only the main parts sometimes; the second sort was called Rembrandt studio, they're works out of his workshop or studio, that is, he provided models and other art workers produced the works; the third sort ended up copy-made works, some of which were counterfeits and some not because he had no motivations for counterfeits. Currently, I reckon, there are two sorts of works in your studio, one is the creation by artist Zhang Huan and his team, the other is solely created by Zhang Huan himself. Jeff Koons' aluminizing small dogs, the sort of some business brand, mass production and easy buy even in a shop, should come as a different business concept. Your current orientation still centers on artist's actual involvement; I believe it's the most valuable aspect of Zhang Huan Studio. During this visit I didn't perceive Zhang Huan as a brand or as only an abstract name; he's still tangible and substantial, and this is critical to art. Personally I hope you wouldn't give up this; ambiguity does exist, but it's something we can investigate gradually and eventually reach a conclusion. I appreciate your open-mind attitude too; it's very good. A thorough open-mindedness, it's a spectacular phenomenon in contemporary art, which demands our careful investigation and analysis.
 Wu Hung: Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, East Asian Languages & Civilizations, and the College; Director, Center for the Art of East Asia; Consulting Curator, Smart Museum of Art. Wu Hung specializes in early Chinese art. He is the author of Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century (University Of Chicago Press, 1999), Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting (Yale University Press, 1997).
Related Links:
Wu Hung -- Yu De Yao Dialogue
An Interview with Professor Wu Hung
Zhang Huan: Banned in Shanghai
Artist: Zhang Huan 
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