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| June 08, 2026 |
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Chinese Artist at Storm King Art Center
Storm King Art Center holds a special dedication ceremony to celebrate the gift and completed installation of Three Legged Buddha (2007), a colossal sculpture by internationally celebrated Chinese artist Zhang Huan. The work, which stands nearly twenty-eight feet high and weighs more than twelve tons, is a generous gift from the artist and The Pace Gallery.
Tibetan monks and musicians will participate in the ceremony, at which the artist will be present. Incense, located in specially designed compartments inside the sculpture, will cause smoke to waft through various openings in the work.
The ceremony takes place at 2:30 pm (rain or shine)
Free with Storm King admission: $12; $10 for senior citizens (65 and older); $8 for college students with a valid ID and students in grades K-12; free for children under five and members.
BUDDHA
Zhang Huan's monumental sculpture represents the bottom half of a sprawling, three-legged behemoth, one of whose feet rests on an eight-foot high human head that appears to be either emerging from or sinking into the earth. The sculpture is part of a series of monumental works inspired several years ago by the artist's encounters, while traveling in Tibet, with remnants of Buddhist statuary that had been destroyed during China's Cultural Revolution (1966–ca. 1971). Zhang began collecting such fragments, hoping to convert the relics into art. In keeping with Tibetan tradition, Three Legged Buddha is made of forged copper. Yet rather than gold-plating or otherwise coloring the copper, as custom would have it, Zhang left its violet hue untouched. He also left the weld marks in the work visible, believing that they both recall the language of painting and convey his belief that welding the copper was akin to the stitching of human skin after surgery.
Three Legged Buddha is installed in Storm King's South Fields, in a grove of 64 sugar-maple trees. Prior to its installation at Storm King, the work was on view at the Royal Academy of Arts, Annenberg Courtyard, London (October 2007 – January 2008), and at La Monnaie, Brussels (August – September 2009). Of its new home at Storm King, Mr. Zhang says, "I hope she completes her life-cycle there."
ZHANG HUAN
Born in Henan Province in 1965, Zhang Huan studied Chinese ink painting, drawing, oil painting, and art history at Henan University, and oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. In 1994, he began a series of groundbreaking performances that represented a turning point in contemporary Chinese art. These included the 1997 To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond, in which forty-six migrant workers walked into a pond in order to increase its volume. A photograph of the performance, showing the artist, carrying a five-year-old child on his shoulders, in the water with the other participants, was the cover image for the catalogue for the 1998 exhibition Inside Out: New Chinese Art, organized by the Asia Society and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, in New York.
Zhang moved to New York City in 1998, and, over the course of the next eight years created thirteen performances and presented his work in five solo exhibitions and more than sixty group shows throughout the United States. He moved back to China in 2006, settling in the Min Hang district of Shanghai. There, aided by some 100 assistants, he engages in an object-based practice.
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