Zheng Huan was born in 1965 in Anyang, Henan Province, China and currently lives and works in Shanghai and New York. He became active in Beijing in the 1990s, where he was considered one of the foremost avant-garde artist in the country.
In 1988 he relocated to New York and became a full-time artist involved in various artistic mediums. In 2005, he returned to Shanghai and established Zheng Huan Studio, where he continues to expand his artistic works, creating new forms and moving into new areas and mediums. The ash painting technique he created has added another method of painting to art history. Other techniques, such as sculpting in cowhide, door carvings and feather woodcuts, to name a few, have all been pioneered by Zheng Huan. While he considers himself a Buddhist, it was only after his trip to Tibet in 2005 that his works showed a strong reference to the religion. In 2011, Zheng’s Buddhist sculpture, Three Heads Six Arms was installed and exhibited outside 1881 Heritage in Hong Kong. The creativity and awesomeness of this sculpture lay in its scale – it was eight meters in height.
Among other places, Zheng’s works have been exhibited in the “2002 Whitney Biennial and Rituals” at the Akademie de Künste in Berlin and in”Haunted: Contemporary Photograph/Video/Performance” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. His solo exhibitions include “Q Confucius” at Rockbund Art Museum Shanghai; “Neither Coming Nor Going” at Pace Wildenstein in New York; “Ashman” at PAC Museum in Milan and “Zhu Gangqiang” at White Cube in London.
His works are also in the public collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum in New York.