12 Square Meters

After graduating from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1993, Zhang Huan was among a small group of avant-garde artists who established the "East Village," an artists' community on the eastern outskirts of Beijing. Zhang Huan and his East Village compatriots worked together and pushed the limits of artistic experimentation and acceptance by Chinese authorities, particularly in art about the human condition such as Zhang Huan's body-based performances involving nudity, endurance, and pain.

12 Square Meters was a performance piece conceptualized by Zhang Huan and photographed by a fellow artist and friend, Rong Rong. He coated his naked body with fish oil and honey and sat in the dirtiest and smelliest public toilet in the East Village for sixty minutes during the heat of summer. Although swarms of flies covered his body, Zhang Huan sat motionless, unflinching, like a Buddhist monk in such intense meditation that he is able to block out the travails of the physical world. In addition to an exercise in self discipline, the artist's performance protests the putrid living conditions in much of China, where public toilets such as this continue to exist in cities and towns in the "shadows of glamorous skyscrapers." Finally, Zhang Huan pays tribute to his friend Ai Wei Wei (another East Village artist) whose family was exiled to Xinjiang during the Cultural Revolution, and whose father was assigned to clean the public toilets every morning.