To Raise the Water Level in a Fish Pond (Close Up)

This vast, iconic photograph documents Zhang Huan's last performance in his native China (he emigrated to the United States in 1998). Born in Henan, in 1965, and affiliated with the group of Beijing East Village artists who became known for their performance art in the 1990s, Zhang's first work took as its central site of inquiry his own body. The spectacular quality of his early performances secured his notoriety: in one, he coated himself in fish oil and honey and sat naked on a public toilet, attracting flies; in another, he lay prone on a block of ice, his body heat gradually leaving the impress of his form on its surface.
To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond also depended on physical fortitude, but in this case the artist hired and choreographed his photographic subjects, a group of itinerant farm workers who disrobed and climbed into a pond near Beijing. The faces of the workers are uniformly serious and somber, and a small boy perched on one man's shoulders, clasping his head, adds a particular note of pathos. The image is striking on its own formal terms, as the bodies are reflected in the water as attenuated distortions and the pond undulates with loose horizontal ripples. And the performance achieved the goal stated in its title, to raise the level of a body of water. Yet the photograph documenting this action presages the tenuous and complicated relation of the individual and the collective at this moment in contemporary China.