Friday, 18 June 2010 13:47 youssefg

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This is neither a new photo machine, nor a police snapshot, this is "Family Tree, 2000" the work of chinese contemporary artist Zhang Huan. In this 9 photos work, Zhang had a calligrapher write on his head with chinese black ink, just like a blank page.

In the first photo Zhang had his own identity chart written on his face. In the following photos the calligrapher wrote family stories and popular stories like "How Yukong Moved the Mountain," the tale Mao used to describe his land-ownership policy.

Zhang blew life in the traditional calligraphic chinese art in this attempt to picture his identity. Beyond Zhang's own identity I see the African roots of a human being as he appears to be in the last snapshot.

In his works, Zhang attempts to highlight the human power to make change through symbolic and simple representations. In 1995, he made a collaborative work, "To add one meter to an anonymous mountain", with 9 artists where everyone every artist was weighed and the heaviest where placed naked and others laid down above. In 1997, Zhang made "to raise the water level in a fishpond", where he hired 40 rural migrants, known as the "floating population", and immersed them in the Nanmofang fish pond, displacing the water level witht their body mass.