Disturbing display

ARTWALK

Zhang Huan is simply one of the most profound, moving and spectacular performance artistes I can think of. Before awarding him this gold medal, I spent a long time thinking of all the performance art I have seen directly or indirectly.

Obviously, I could not recall everything, but a lot of what I did seemed to pale in comparison with the sheer strength of Zhang Huan. My cliched question to myself was: Is Huan what he is because of this East-West combination he has braided together?

He had, after all, been living till 10 years ago in China, been part of the art movement of the 1980s when new ideas taking from both the East and the West emerged in the Chinese mainstream.

For a decade now, he has lived in New York. The reason I didn't buy that East-West idea was because I could recall several parallels in India, minus the quality of work. So then, what is it about Zhang Huan that makes him so compelling? An ongoing, retrospective show at the Asia Society in New York helped put some pieces in place.

Step into some of his works: In his 2000 work, Family Tree, he invites people to write in calligraphic Chinese letters, in black ink, on his face. From morning to evening, he waits, offering his face for despoilment.

At the end, we see only an inky green-black head. He has been completely overwritten. His vulnerability is on display. It is terrifying, it is grisly and unnerving for the ease with which the human face becomes a graffiti sheet, a kind of violation of the sacrosanct in many ways.

Where people wear make-up to enhance their faces, we have here its effortless opposite. Huan teases out this bestial aspect, underscoring it with his own passivity and lack of expression. It isn't new. Yoko Ono's performances have involved audiences chopping off her clothing using a menacing pair of scissors.

Like this work, Ono's created a sense of voyeurism and vulnerability all at once. Yet, Huan's passivity polishes a horror mirror that reflects a strange collective sadism. His offering his face as a blackboard and the act of defacing a person in a society where systems are designed to save them from themselves "" all cumulatively become such a mirror.

Remaining passive is a hallmark of many of Huan's performances. In photographs of his work (and presumably during his performances too), he remains expressionless, something like an absorbent vessel.

There is an extraordinary work, 12 Square Meters, where he sits in one of China's tiny public toilets for an hour, his body rubbed with honey and a fish-based liquid. The facility is filthy, as most of them are. While he is there, dozens of flies sit on him, almost changing the pattern on his characteristically shaved head. This is his way (as long ago as in 1994) of addressing and illuminating China, the almost- superpower, a strangely ironic title that his own works and words contradict.

Huan's passivity, a learned helplessness, is an extraordinarily loaded comment on living in China. There is the public facility, but it stinks. You can't protest, except by allowing the flies to desecrate you, by dehumanising yourself, simultaneously daring and taunting the state through this act.

Everything isn't sombre. Huan's wry lens can make great work too. The iconic To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond is one example. In this, he hired daily labourers in 1997 to step into a pond with him, just enough to push up the water level.

In another, his friends helped raise the height of a hill by a meter by lying on top of it "" naked (in 1995). Or, in 2006 in New York, when he encased himself in raw meat at the Whitney, muscular like a Hollywood hero, and displaying his new avatar with panache.

His wit and engagement with the local site, mostly now in the West, continues, with ticklish results, on the cusp of his characteristic sombre.

As always, he blends the personal with the local. This is a space without a fence to hold the art inside. These works were created in both China and New York and sometimes in other Western cities.

What makes them riveting is the use of unlikely devices as remonstration. They disturb us even as they unleash our inner, often politically incorrect, morbid fascination with others' minds and our collective tolerance of their trauma.