| Biography | Inventory Catalogue | Artists Represented | Zhang Wanxin
Biography:
1961 Born in ChangChun City, China
1961 Born in ChangChun City, China
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| Biography | Inventory Catalogue | Artists Represented | Zhang Wanxin |
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Biography:
1961 Born in ChangChun City, China |
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Education: |
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1992-1996 |
Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture, Academy of Art University, San Francisco, USA |
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1980-1985 |
Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture, Luxun Institute of Fine Art, ShengYang, Liaoning Province, China |
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1978-1980 |
Diploma of Fine Art, Art School of Jilin, Changchun, Jilin Province, China |
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Teaching: |
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1996-present |
Instructor, Academy of Art University San Francisco , USA |
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1985-1992 |
Assistant Professor, Jilin Art College , ChangChun, China |
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Solo Exhibitions: |
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| 2010 | “A
Ten Year Survey:
1999-2009”,
Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, Arizona Travelling to: Boise Art Museum, Boise, Idaho The Art Center, St. Petersburg, Florida Bellevue Arts Museum, Bellevue, Washingston (2011) |
| “Wanxin’s New Works”, Udinotti Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona | |
| “Wanxin Zhang 2010”, Mindy Solomon Gallery, St. Petersburg, Florida | |
| 2009 |
“Wanxin Zhang New Sculptures”, University of San Francisco, Thacher Gallery |
| “Sculpture Terrace”, University of San Francisco, Kalmanovitz Hall | |
| ”Atrium”, University of San Francisco, Kalmanovitz Hall | |
| “Contemporary Warriors”, Sonoma State University, University Art Gallery, Rohnert Park, California | |
| “Wanxin Zhang: Ceramic Sculptures”, Udinotti Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona | |
| 2008 |
"Pit
#5, Shifting Dreams", Bedford Gallery, Lesher Center for the Arts,
Walnut Creek, California USA |
| "Report
from Pit #5", Art Beatus Gallery, Hong Kong, China |
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| "Pit
#5, Michigan", The Alden B.Dow Museum of Science & Art, Midland Art
Center, Midland, Michigan, USA |
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| 2007 |
"Pit
#5, California Artist Too", Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, California, USA |
| 2006 |
"Wanxin
Zhang's New Works", Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, Miami, Florida, USA |
| “Pit
#5 Laramie , 2006”, University of Wyoming Art Museum Laramie, Wyoming |
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| 2004 |
“Figures
of the Future‘s Past - Pit #5”, Bernice Steinbaum Gallery Miami,
Florida, USA |
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2002 |
“Ceramic Sculpture”, Triangle Gallery San
Francisco, USA
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| 2001 |
“Treasures of
China-A-Dialogue”, Vorpal Gallery San Francisco, USA
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| 1997 |
“Wanxin
Zhang 1997”, Space 303 San Francisco, USA |
| "Breaking Out",
Chinese Cultural Center, San Francisco, USA |
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| 1996 |
Dialogue” MFA
Graduate Show, Academy of Art University Sculpture Center, San
Francisco, USA
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| 2010 |
“Glimpses: Contemporary Ceramics”, Pacini Lubel Gallery, Seattle, Washington |
| “Nine Lives: Dog Day of the Summer”, Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, Miami, Florida | |
| 2008 | “Wyoming Invitational”, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming |
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“Spirit
and Form”, Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, California |
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| "A
Human Impulse: Figuration from the Diane and Sandy Besser Collection",
Arizona State University Art Museum, USA |
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| "Artists
to Watch - Asia", Turner Carroll Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA |
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| "Taiwan
Ceramics Biennale", Taipei County Yingge Ceramics Museum, Taipei, Taiwan |
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| 2007 |
"In
Your Face", Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, Miami, USA |
| "Clay
and Brush: The Ceramic Art of China", Lowe Museum of Art, Coral Gables,
Florida, USA |
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| "What
is Next?", Florida Craftsman Gallery, St. Petersburg, Florida, USA |
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| "The
22nd UBE Biennale International Sculpture Competition", Yamaguchi, Japan |
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| 2006 |
“45th
Anniversary” Triangle Gallery, San Francisco, USA |
| “Landscape
Sculpture Design for Beijing 2008 Olympic Games”, Beijing, China |
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| 2005 |
“Little
Basil” Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, Miami, USA |
| “Riverbend
Sculpture Biennial 2005”, Owensboro Museum of Fine Arts Owensboro ,
Kentucky, USA |
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| “The
Other Mainstream”, Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, Arizona,
USA |
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| "Palm
Beach 3", Represented by Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, Miami, USA |
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| "The
7th San Francisco International Art Expo", Byron Cohen Gallery, Kansas
City, Missouri, USA |
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| 2004 |
"It's
for the Birds" Traveling Exhibition, Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, Miami,
USA |
| "Art
Basel Miami Beach" International Art Fair, Bernice Steinbaum Gallery,
Miami, USA |
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| 2003 |
“Across the Divide”, Gatov and Werby Art Gallery Cal State Long Beach, CA, USA |
| "Art
Basel Miami Beach" International Art Fair, Bernice Steinbaum Gallery,
Miami, USA |
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| "Fourth
Toronto International Art Fair", Art Beatus Gallery, Vancouver, Canada |
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| "14th
Annual California Conference for the Advancement of Ceramic Art",
Davis, CA, USA |
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"International Art Expo, Chicago", Art
Beatus Gallery, Vancouver, Canada
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| "Gallery
Artists", John Elder Gallery, New York, New York, USA |
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| 2001 |
“Selected Artists”,Triangle Gallery San
Francisco, USA
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| 2000 |
"2000
All California Exhibition", San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, USA
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| "Sculpture
2000", Catholic University of America, Washington, USA |
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| 1999 |
"Lunar
New Year Celebration", Hayward Art Council, Hayward City Hall, CA, USA
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| 1998 |
"The
Light is Diverse in California", Center for Visual Art, Oakland, USA
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| "The
Fifth Annual San Francisco International Art Festival", Vorpal Gallery,
San Francisco, USA |
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| 1997 |
"Contemporary
Sculpture", Vorpal Gallery, San Francisco, USA |
| "California
Clay Competition Exhibition", The Artery Gallery, Davis, CA, USA |
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| 1996 |
"The
21st Annual Open Show", Roseville Art Center, Roseville, CA, USA
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| "Spring
Show", Academy Of Art University, San Francisco, CA, USA |
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| "June
Juries Show", Gallery Router One, Point Reyes Station, CA, USA |
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| 1995 |
"Gallery
Artist", Triangle Gallery, San Francisco, USA
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| "The
10th International Art Exchange", Asian Art Society in America, San
Francisco, USA |
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| 1990 |
"Asian
11th Champion Art Exhibition", International Exhibition Center,
Beijing, China
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| 1989 |
"The
7th National Fine Art Exhibition", National Fine Art Gallery, Beijing,
China
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| 1987 |
"The
60th Anniversary Army Art Show", National Fine Art Gallery, Beijing,
China
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Awards: |
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| 2006 |
Virginia
A. Groot Foundation Sculptors Grant – 1 st Place Evanston , Illinois,
USA |
| NEA
/ Warhol Foundation, Artist-in-Residence Award, University of Wyoming,
Laramie, WY, USA |
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| 2004 |
The
Joan Mitchell Foundation Inc. Painters & Sculptors Grant, New York,
USA |
| 2000 |
Distinctive
Merit Award, San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, USA
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| 1997 |
Honorary
Merit Award of the Outdoor Sculpture Search, Los Altos City, USA
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| 1989 |
Sculpture Bronze
Prize, The 7th National Art Exhibition, National Art Gallery Beijing,
China
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| Selective Collections: | |
| Academy
of Art University, San Francisco, California, USA |
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| City
of Albuquerque, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA |
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| City
of Dalian, Dalian, China |
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| Fresno
Art Museum, Fresno, California, USA |
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| Lowe
Museum of Art, Coral Gables, Florida, USA |
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| National
Fine Art Gallery, Beijing, China |
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| Sandy
Besser Collection, Sante Fe, New Mexico, USA |
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| University
of Wyoming Art Museum, Laramie, Wyoming, USA |
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| Virginia
A. Groot Foundation, Evanston, Illinois, USA |
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| Private
collectors in US and Switzerland |
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| Review: | |
| Tyranny Meets
Irreverence in Pit #5 Wanxin Zhang’s sculptures are born of the collision of disparate social movements and their attendant aesthetic innovations, brought together by the happenstance of the artist’s life and personal inclinations. Colliding elements include the Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and its ubiquitous propaganda, the harsh dictatorship of Qin Shi Huang (259-210 BCE) which produced the famous life-sized terracotta army, and the 1960s and 1970s American counter-culture movement, one of whose products was Funk Art. Such an unlikely combination of influences coalesced in Zhang’s oeuvre not long after his 1992 move from his native China to San Francisco. The result was a highly individualistic body of works that employ sly humor to undercut imperatives to conformity, whether dictated by historical megalomaniacs, or by modern culture. As a student in the Department of Sculpture at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang, Wanxin Zhang followed a rigorous five-year course of study that focused on figural realism, emphasizing the use of clay. Following graduation, Zhang favored working with metal, but he returned to clay upon arriving in San Francisco and being exposed to the works of such clay artists as Peter Voulkos (1924-2002) and Robert Arneson (1930-1992). The former founded the California clay movement with his large-scale, rough, obviously hand-shaped works, and is credited with giving clay, “previously regarded as restricted to the realm of craft, a working vocabulary for use in freestanding sculpture.” Arneson, a leading light of the Bay Area Funk Art movement, imparted a funky twist to clay, producing works that were humorously anti-establishment—not only in terms of their overt subject matter, but also in their irreverent stance against the art establishment which favored “serious” modes such as abstract expressionism. The result was that “when Funk merged with Arneson’s brand of narrative it catapulted the sculptor outside the framework of the other clay practitioners.” The Bay Area Funk clay movement inspired Zhang to return to clay and experiment with expressing his personal experiences of historical forces in brash, large-scale works infused with humor. As his career has matured, Wanxin Zhang has developed an ongoing major series of works that fall under the umbrella title of Pit #5. The signature image from this series is that of a standing figure modeled after the terracotta warriors that were discovered buried in pits adjacent to the burial mound of Qin Shi Huang, near Xi’an. Four pits had been constructed to house the emperor’s army: Zhang’s Pit #5 follows on from there. While free-standing clay sculpture may have been a novelty in terms of later twentieth-century art, the discovery of Qin Shi Huang’s terracotta army showed that it had flourished two thousand years ago in China. The tomb sculptures were discovered in 1974; Zhang visited the site in 1983, catalyzing for him the revelation that the first emperor of Qin, as a dictator who employed art as propaganda, was a historical precedent to Mao Zedong. Zhang compared the megalomania of a tyrant who would divert untold labor (that of up to 700,000 men) to the creation of a tomb complex that would glorify him in the afterlife, with that of Mao, whose image was ubiquitous during the Cultural Revolution: literally billions of his portraits were produced in the form of sculptures, paintings, posters, buttons, tapestries, and so on. Qin Shi Huang is credited with destroying knowledge through the execution of intellectuals and destruction of books that were counter to his interests; Mao Zedong was responsible for death and destruction on an even grander scale, and Wanxin Zhang finally fully understood this upon viewing the terracotta army. The works presented in the current exhibition include the artist’s familiar riffs on the terracotta army, as well as figures emerging from a red wall symbolic of Chinese culture, and sculptures referencing iconic Cultural Revolution objects. Among the latter are discs featuring silhouettes of Mao’s face, referring to the Mao buttons whose large-scale production consumed so much metal that Mao once quipped the metal should perhaps be diverted to the manufacture of airplanes. In comparison to the original small, mass-produced shiny red and gold Mao buttons, Zhang has created larger, obviously hand-hewn discs where the absence of Mao’s facial features is an obliteration equivalent to the destruction of “feudal,” “rightist,” and “anti-revolutionary” elements under Mao—which in real terms meant the destruction of individuals whose thinking was not in line with the policies of Mao or his representatives. Notable among Mao’s supposed representatives were the Red Guards, young people excited by the idea of creating ongoing revolution, who in an unchecked frenzy performed widespread acts of destruction of cultural property, and violent persecution of anyone they considered anti-revolutionary. Zhang has fashioned clay versions of the armbands worn by the Red Guards, inscribed with their identifying title, Hongweibing (Red Guard), but making subversive puns by substituting characters pronounced similarly but having different meanings (for example, inserting wei characters that mean tiny, flavor, and tail). Zhang also has created a few models of the site most strongly associated with Mao’s power, Tiananmen, from where he made proclamations and addressed millions. Sunflowers adorn two of the Tiananmen sculptures: Zhang has commented, “When I was young, there was a song called ‘The [Communist] Party is the Sun, I am the Flower’ to convince the people that the government is all powerful and nurturing. However, as I think back now from an artist’s perspective, I realize that that period is actually very dark, and the crude sun and the upside down flowers represent that. . . . The period was definitely not as beautiful or ‘shiny’ as it was made out to be.” Three sculptures in the exhibition depict figures emerging from a red slab background which may be a wall, but also suggests an imperial door adorned with bosses. One figure is still embedded in the wall; a second has emerged and wears the blue of the Mao era or of the pre-Maoist scholar; and a third—whose features are most fully realized—sits at his ease clad in contemporary business attire. According to the artist the wall represents Chinese culture, and the fact that different figures emerge from the same wall reflects the fact that some aspects of Chinese culture, notably central control, seem never to change. Another figure is inscribed with numbers on his chest and stands against a white background: he is standing in front of a shooting range target. Zhang explains “The figure is a combination of Terra Cotta Warriors and Red Guards and demonstrates how they were being used by the government/dictator of their times and how they had no thoughts of their own. Their full acceptance of the government is a hereditary slave-kind of thinking that was nurtured by the imposing government.” Like the figure standing against a target, Zhang’s freestanding figures also merge Red Guard with terracotta warrior. They have left youth behind, and their demeanors suggest disillusionment. They are ready to fight for neither the protection of Qin Shi Huang in the afterlife, nor for Mao’s ongoing revolution: the expectations placed upon them seem to have exhausted them. In a sense this is heartening. Unlike the terracotta warriors, who may appear to represent individuals but were assembled from endlessly recombined molded variants of different body parts, and unlike the Red Guards, who surrendered their individualism in favor of mass hysteria, these men appear to be individuals shaped by time and experience. If society can learn from experience, too, then there is hope for the future. That Wanxin Zhang serves up these complex ideas surrounding societal control with a touch of irreverent humor renders them all the more powerful. He leads his viewers to the realization that past, present, and future are interrelated, and the legacy of the past must be understood for the sake of an unencumbered future. Britta Erickson (Note: Catalogue essay funds were donated to the Red Cross for Sichuan earthquake relief.) |
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Artist Statement: |
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Time and Space of Tunnel Statement By Wanxin Zhang Even though the Qin Terra-cotta army have thousands of gestures and hundreds of poses, all of them belonged to the burial compound of Qin Shi Huang, whom was the first emperor of China two thousand years ago. My sculptures are inspired by those warriors and consist of a dialogue between myself, history, and today. I am not focusing on new artistic skills, but rather on a better understanding of aesthetic concepts and philosophical recognition. Under my hand, each figure is a re-built assembly of the characteristics of modern free people. They are roaming among the past and the present. They are an individual group of people who have a dynamic form and romantic sense of humor, but also contain the mysterious enlightenment of eastern art. They are crossing between traditional and contemporary, and as a result of the connection between the visible and invisible worlds, these sculptures symbolize the confusion and loss felt by modern human beings, causing the change of time and space. I preferred using a narrative way of sculpting and making of each piece tell a story, a legend, or a fairy tale. I melt my feelings and thoughts into clay: through expressions, forms, compositions, and ideas to discover a new identity, thus giving them an inner vitality. My sculptures depict the same format, or more or less the same as the terra-cotta army, but with distinct differences of body expressions, gestures, and physical characteristics; they reflect rather complex emotional states. This is how I try to explain my feelings through the contradictions found in history and society. Eighteen years ago, I was standing in front of the Qin's Terra-cotta army at the museum in Xi'an. I faced thousands of armed soldiers underground, and I was shocked. I silently asked myself: Who were they? Where did they come from? Why are they standing here? Even though many years had passed, the first impression I had is still in my mind. I anticipate that my works of art can raise the same questions to the audience. |
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