Zhang Huan

Among the first Chinese artists to turn to performance art, Zhang Huan, a member of the "Beijing East Village" community, focused, in his early work, on submitting his naked body to extreme psychological and physical situations. Of late, theatricality and narrative have played increasing larger roles in his work, as in a 1997 piece in which he commissioned a group of farmworkers to climb into a fish pond near Beijing, thus creating an image representing the flooding of cities by masses from the country.