Zhang Huan, Peace
July 2003 - April 2004
Creative Time presents Peace, an elegant sculpture by celebrated Chinese artist Zhang Huan exploring ancestral history and ethnic assimilation. Peace, the third installation in Creative Time's multidisciplinary public sculpture series, Art on the Plaza at The Ritz-Carlton New York, Battery Park, opens in late July, 2003 and will remain on view through April, 2004. Creative Time will also host a public performance by the artist on the Plaza the evening of Tuesday, October 7, 2003 at 6:30 p.m., in which Zhang Huan will be joined by members of the Shaolin Temple, known for its unique Kung-Fu practice and Buddhist culture.
Peace is presented by Creative Time and The Ritz-Carlton New York, Battery Park, in cooperation with The Battery Park City Authority. The installation is the latest iteration of Creative Time's continued exploration of contemporary sculpture's myriad manifestations in Art on the Plaza.
Peace
Peace embodies the relation of experience to environment, identity to culture, and body to spirit- the cardinal themes of Zhang Huan's work, which includes performance, photography, and sculpture. In Peace, a large bell modeled after those found in Chinese temples hangs next to a gilded life cast of the artist's naked body. The bronze bell is inscribed with the names of the artist's ancestors from his native village in China while the rigid perpendicular body bears naturalistic details such as creases in the skin and strands of hair. Viewers are invited to drive the body into the bell, thereby forcing a confrontation between the artist and his ancestral past.
The participatory nature of Peace cannot be fully understood outside the context of Zhang Huan's performances, which began in China in 1993 and have since evolved to occasionally engage his sculptural installations. Zhang Huan's conviction that he can achieve the rawest form of artistic expression by employing his body as an artistic medium has led him to enact often-gruesome physical feats, which, in his words, "enable one to understand, and enrich one's knowledge of life." Peace is a performance by proxy: the cast is a surrogate for the artist himself while the sounding of the bell by viewers is experiential. The bell vocalizes the clash of cultures in which Zhang Huan is suspended and, within view of Ellis Island, even asks viewers to consider their own relationship to ancestry and identity.