Zhang Huan Retrospective and Asian Art Scene in New York, Winter 2007-2008

In late 2007, New York offered a mild winter that made gallery-going unusually pleasant, with several exhibitions highlighting Asian art. The Asia Society mounted the first retrospective of Zhang Huan, tracing his career from radical performances in Beijing's poor neighborhoods in the early 1990s to his move to New York in 1998, where he created provocative works like 'My New York'—in which he walked Madison Avenue covered in raw steak, distributing white doves amid the Afghanistan war and rising tensions in Iraq. The exhibition's third section, focused on his recent Shanghai studio, showed a shift toward large-scale sculptures, collective production, and Buddhist themes, though some works risked being overly 'Chinese'-labeled. At Luhring Augustine Gallery in Chelsea, Yasumasa Morimura presented 'Requiem for the 20th Century,' a series of self-portraits reenacting iconic 20th-century images such as Lenin at the podium, the Saigon execution, and Einstein sticking out his tongue, questioning our relationship with history and images. Meanwhile, the New Museum, celebrating its 30th anniversary, opened a new building designed by the Tokyo-based collective SANAA—a stacked-box structure clad in aluminum mesh, located on the Bowery in the Lower East Side. The museum's ground-floor glass facade opens onto the street, and its program emphasizes contemporary art, with partnerships including Insa Art Space from Korea.