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Popular Culture Review
a larger context of Zhang Huan’s artistic repertoire that confronts the cultural
confluence and conflicts, I argue that it does not exploit his “Chinese-ness” but
problematizes our binary schema of the worldview. The performance is not an
exotic tableau of the Asian body in the Euro-centric American continent, but
rather a familiar tableau of the hefty American bodybuilder’s body through
metamorphosis of a slim Chinese man. Zhang Huan presents a complex saga of
the body through an easily recognizable heroic icon that is “a plurality with one
sense, a war and a peace” in Friedrich Nietzsche’s term, the powerful and the
powerless, and the strong and the weak. This was exactly what the artist noticed
in newly transformed post-9/11 New York City where, according to Zhang
himself, “many things appear very strong, but in actuality they are very weak.”
Like American superheroes who were granted superpowers but underwent
psychological traumas and suffered from insecurity, the artist found the very
same propensity in the city of New York and made it his subject.
Like Batman’s black armor and Spider-Man’s spandex suit, Meat-Man
requires a beefy suit as the symbol of his super powers. It aggrandizes the body
and bestows the aura of aggressive might and commanding vigor to the person.
It makes him super-human. It transforms the ordinary man into a superior
creature. Unlike those fictional superheroes’ operative outfits, however, MeatMan’s costume does not facilitate better performance but rather prohibits it since
his beef costume was incredibly heavy—over 110 pounds (50 kilograms)—and
caused him to struggle while walking.5 This impracticality of the suit makes the
process of self-aggrandizing neither pompous nor outlandish but rather
burdensome.
The use of meat as artistic medium has been explored by other
contemporary artists like Jana Sterbak whose Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino
Anorectic (1987) presents a dress stitched together from 60 pounds of heavily
salted and air-dried raw flank steak and leaves it on the gallery floor to show the
natural aging process. Like Vanitas that meditates on the brevity of life and the
inevitability of death, My New York exaggerates the stinking, mortal, weighty
flesh of the body through the presence of meat that to an extent the medium
becomes the very subject matter itself. Unlike Vanitas that differentiates the
body of the artist and the meat dress and addresses more exclusively on vanity
of fashion and beauty, Zhang’s work does not allow the viewer to see rotting
meat for the vanitas lesson, as Meat-Man disappears from our view before meat
decomposes. Instead, his work leads us to see gluttony of humanity. He treats
the material not only as a marker of the body’s mortality but also as part of the
body itself. The meat outfit here is not meant to be construed as a dress but as
the excessive body itself formed by a high protein diet. The muscles of the meat
body are over-sculpted towards the level of Mr. America’s surreal bodies. As the
artist put it himself:
In New York I see many body builders who, for long periods
of time, do training exercises beyond their bodies’ capabilities.