Q: What has three heads and six arms?
A: Three Heads Six Arms.
It makes a lame joke, but Chinese artist Zhang Huan's sculpture, which has made its world premiere here, is perhaps the most monumental public art piece in San Francisco. Besides having multiple heads and limbs, the copper, Buddhist-inspired work reaches 26 feet high. Three Heads Six Arms sprawls between City Hall and the Asian Art Museum and weighs about 15 tons--so hefty that engineers had to calculate exactly where it could be placed without caving in the Civic Center parking garage below.
Chinese artist Zhang, 45, came from Shanghai for its installation and international premiere. At the dedication ceremony, San Francisco Arts Commission officials noted that the artwork fulfilled Mayor Gavin Newsom’s request for something “spectacular” and big for the Shanghai Celebration, a Bay-Area-wide cultural program honoring 30 years of sister city-hood between San Francisco and Shanghai.
The mega-sculpture is on loan to San Francisco through 2011.
Zhang, an internationally renowned Chinese contemporary artist, said Three Heads Six Arms was inspired by the fragments of Buddhist figures that he discovered at a market in Tibet. They’d been damaged during China’s 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, when anyone and anything linked to religion, intellectualism, materialism and tradition was attacked and condemned. Thus Three Heads Six Arms is also incomplete, missing body parts from the midriff down.
“When I saw these fragments in Lhasa, a mysterious power impressed me,” Zhang told the San Francisco Arts Commission. “They’re embedded with historical and religious traces, just like the limbs of a human being.”
Zhang’s colossal sculpture has a broken arm, like a statue in the Lhasa market had. By recreating the crippled religious figures and enlarging them to super-human scale, Zhang believes he can help alleviate the suffering caused by their desecration. One of the heads is of a Buddhist deity. The two others are of humans; one of them is Zhang's.
The body--and particularly his own--has been an ongoing theme for Zhang. He was born in a village in Henan Province just before the Cultural Revolution erupted, and he studied in the early 1990s at China’s best art school, the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. He and other young Chinese established an artists’ community in a suburb. There, Zhang devised and delivered his earliest performance pieces, often using his own body as the medium.
In 12 Square Meters, Zhang stripped, was doused with honey and fish oil, and sat for an hour in a public outhouse as flies and bugs swarmed. To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain was achieved on a mountain peak by a one-meter-high pile of nine naked people lying on top of one another.
In 1998, Zhang was included in a seminal exhibit of Chinese contemporary art arranged by the Asia Society and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York. He decided to stay in New York, and continued his provocative performances.
In Dream of Dragon (1999) at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, Zhang, lying naked though smeared with dog food, was surrounded by several dogs of various breeds. The dogs began fighting over the food. One bit Zhang’s derriere, thus ending the performance.
During his San Francisco visit for the Three Heads Six Arms premiere, Zhang recalled that Dream of Dragon was analogous to his life in New York at that time: “I was bitten by dogs from all sides.” He likes the Big Apple, he said, “but I also have an unspeakable fear of it.”
For the first five years in New York City, Zhang said, he was “very productive” and saw and learned a lot. But then his curiosity and the city’s freshness waned, so he returned to China in 2005. He chose to settle in Shanghai because “it’s a new city to me.”
Zhang also stopped performance, fearing it (or he) was getting repetitive, and took up more conventional genres like sculpture and painting. But his work is hardly conventional--for example, he “paints” with ashes left over from burned incense at temples.
Now that Zhang is acclaimed worldwide (“I have openings nearly every month,” he said, in a public talk at the Asian Art Museum), he calls himself “a professional artist without freedom.”
“It’s no longer about just myself. It’s about 100 people,” he said.
The body is still a touchy and “a very private concept for me,” Zhang added. “When you discover you can’t control a muscle on your face or your stomach’s gotten bigger, or when you discover you’re always tired, or some part of the body feels uncomfortable, that’s a big fear for me.”
