Performance on the Blockchain: Zhang Huan and EchoX

Abstract

In 2002, Chinese artist Zhang Huan crossed through New York’s streets wearing a bodysuit made of raw meat that shaped him with bulging contours and expanded his presence to into a humanoid, Hulk-like figure. By this time, it had been four years since Zhang left China. He had previously studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where he graduated in 1993. With personal identity and existential survival being his most pressing topics at the time, Zhang was able to exercise a radical, self-exploitative practice as a performance artist. In 2021, as part of a collaboration with the Taipei-based tech platform EchoX, Zhang created Celestial Burial of an Artist, a digital project that revisited Zhang’s meat-suit intervention My New York, his earlier work that now holds a firm position in the canon of performance art at the turn of the century. The two decades since Zhang’s original performance intervention have seen a trend towards score-based, multiscale practices, depending less on artists’ physical presence, and departing from extreme physical actions. Zhang’s artistic trajectory relates to the conceptualization of the performative, too, even though his practice has since focused on the creation of object-based works.