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Visiting Zhang Yanzi’s\u00a0A Quest for Healing at Surgeons\u2019 Hall Museums, Edinburgh, for New Scientist, 31 May 2018.<\/a><\/p>\n Scar<\/i>\u00a0is mounted on the wall of a small, brand-new gallery space in Edinburgh\u2019s Surgeons\u2019 Museums. Because of the way the room is laid out,\u00a0this is probably the last piece you will come to. And that\u2019s good, as\u00a0Scar<\/em>\u00a0offers the perfect coda to Zhang Yanzi\u2019s solo show A Quest for Healing.<\/p>\n Scar<\/em>\u00a0is\u00a0modelled on a surgical bed\u00a0Zhang spotted at the Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences. (The building itself was where treatments were developed for the bubonic plague, which raged in Hong Kong even into the 20th century.)\u00a0It\u2019s a violent and terrible cruciform structure, wrapped in bloody bandages \u2013 or at least, that\u2019s my first impression. I step closer: the \u201cblood\u201d is ink made of cinnabar, a vermilion-red pigment traditionally used in Chinese painting. Zhang, one of China\u2019s foremost contemporary artists, is no stranger to traditional techniques; much of her work has its roots in the artistic and poetic depictions of landscape known as\u00a0Shan shui<\/em><\/p>\n And those \u201cbloody\u201d smears and stains turn out to be exquisitely detailed miniature scenes of flowing water, framed by \u201chillsides\u201d of calligraphy, combining poetry with Zhang\u2019s private thoughts. What at a distance seemed to be a work about violent medical intervention, becomes, closer in, to be something deeply personal, calming \u2013 even kind.<\/p>\n The stereotypical view of contemporary art is that it\u2019s too clever for its own good and heartless with it, constantly tripping the unwary viewer into moments of horrified realisation (ever looked closely at a Grayson Perry pot?) Zhang\u2019s work pushes in the opposite direction. In the centre of the gallery, an outsize felt-covered \u201cbroken heart\u201d \u00a0is pierced with thousands of acupuncture needles. This is shocking enough, but only until the eye adjusts and you realise that those pins \u2013 so fine, and so many \u2013 are more likely cushioning the heart from further assault.<\/p>\n A Quest for Healing is not a sentimental show. Several pieces\u00a0convey a powerful sense of human fragility. The most colourful piece here is also the most daunting: a wall-mounted pyramid of medical blister packs, their pills removed and replaced by strips of paper on which schoolchildren \u2013 thousands of them \u2013 have inscribed their prayers and wishes for the future. The weight of expectation borne by\u00a0Wishing Capsules<\/i>\u00a0(pictured above) feels positively oppressive.<\/p>\n Then there are the linked drawings of\u00a0Limitless,<\/i>\u00a0filling one wall with exquisitely drawn ants \u2013 half living things, half calligraphy, massing like clouds of stars. You can\u2019t separate these\u00a0tiny figures from each other, but then again,\u00a0 you can\u2019t write the\u00a0whole lot off as a mere texture, either.<\/p>\n Artists who dabble in medicine are a dime a dozen. Zhang is different. She\u2019s steeped in this imagery, growing up in Jiangsu Province in the 1970s, playing with her doctor father\u2019s stethoscope. While by no means rejecting Western medicine, Zhang makes us aware how much more effectively the Chinese tradition\u00a0gets\u00a0us to think about mortality, and time, and the nature of being a material body: yearning, growing, dying.\u00a0And the work that results from all this? A Quest for Healing is, simply, the most humane art about medicine I have seen in years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Visiting Zhang Yanzi’s\u00a0A Quest for Healing at Surgeons\u2019 Hall Museums, Edinburgh, for New Scientist, 31 May 2018. Scar\u00a0is mounted on the wall of a small, brand-new gallery space in Edinburgh\u2019s Surgeons\u2019 Museums. Because of the way the room is laid … Continue reading <\/div>\n\n\nThere\u2019s a clever perspectival game being played in this show: our cosmic insignificance is a given, but our complexity demands that we press ourselves against each other, in an effort to understand.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n