Born in Beijing, Zhan Wang (Chinese, b.1962) is one of the most commercially successful Conceptual sculptors in China. Zhan’s art education started at an early age, from brush painting lessons by his grandfather and sketching lessons by his uncle, to the endless games of brick building (which foreshadowed his later urban landscape series). As a sculpture major at the China Central Academy of Fine Art, Zhan spent his entire college years in the atmosphere of the 85 New-Wave Movement. Between his Realist training at the Academy and the Modernist influences that came from exhibitions, conferences, and sensational events, Zhan started developing his own style. In his 1990 Sidewalk series, Zhan tried to break from the sculptural tradition of depicting only religious or heroic figures, by choosing the most common people on the sidewalks as his subjects. He used painted resin as medium instead of the traditional monochrome bronze and marble, and covered these life-size sculptures with real clothes, before painting them. This series was regarded as the starting point of hyper-realist sculpture in China. Towards the end of 1993, Zhan started experimenting on more Conceptual sculpture, producing a new series The Mao suit. In his 1994 work Free and Natural Space, Zhan used a stiffening agent to permanently mold Mao suits into such shapes to imply a contorted body within. The same idea of emphasizing the “shell,” instead of what’s underneath, was carried on in the artist’s most well-known series, Artificial rock. In this series, Zhan painstakingly pounds, bends, heats, and molds sections of stainless steel plate across the cloud-like topography of the traditional “scholars'' rocks,” then peels away the “skin” in sections, and welds them together to create a cold and hollow duplicate of the rock, whose surface mirrors the industrialized world. This work became the first Chinese Contemporary sculpture to be collected by The Metropolitan Museum, and stimulated many performance pieces by the artist in the following years. Zhan now lives and works in Beijing.
