Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Ceramics, sculpture
Website: wanxinzhang.com
Wanxin Zhang was born in 1961 in Changchun, China. He grew up during Mao Zedong’s regime in the 1960s and 70s and was among the first generation of Chinese students to receive formal art education after the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976. He graduated with a BFA in Sculpture from the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Art in 1985, went on to exhibit widely in China — including at the National Museum in Beijing — and in 1992 emigrated to the United States, settling in San Francisco. He completed an MFA at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco in 1996, and was subsequently mentored by Peter Voulkos (whom he encountered at Artworks Foundry in Berkeley) and Al Farrow, fellow artist in this wiki. He has taught at UC Berkeley, the California College of the Arts, the Academy of Art University, and the San Francisco Art Institute. He has lived and worked in San Francisco since 1992 and has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 2013.
His work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Renwick Gallery), the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Crocker Art Museum, the Montalvo Arts Center, and the American Museum of Ceramic Art. His awards include a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2004) and a Virginia A. Groot Foundation Grant (2006). He has participated in major international sculpture and ceramics biennials in Japan, Taiwan, and China.
Zhang works in high-fired clay with glaze to produce monumental figurative sculptures that fuse the vocabulary of the Chinese Terracotta Warriors — whose excavation he witnessed in person as a student — with Bay Area Figurative and California Funk aesthetics. His figures are simultaneously ancient and contemporary: life-size warriors painted in candy pink, life-size heads covered in bubble-gum color, ritual teapots stripped of handles, brick-like wall structures that carry the weight of cultural history. A central ongoing series, Color Face, pays tribute to Chinese opera mask traditions in which color signals character and moral status — redeployed as a meditation on the experience of otherness within the United States. His practice consistently probes the collision of feudalism and freedom, the Cultural Revolution’s suppression of culture and California’s embrace of individualism.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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