If 20th-century Western art was jump-started by a urinal (submitted by Marcel Duchamp, under the pseudonym "R. Mutt," to the 1917 Independents exhibition), a founding moment for the new Chinese art took place in a public toilet on the outskirts of Beijing in 1994. There, Zhang Huan—a 29-year-old artist living beside a garbage dump in the city's eastern suburbs, a ramshackle neighborhood that he and his friends had dubbed "the East Village" in emulation of New York's bohemian mecca—stepped into a typically squalid latrine on a summer day and felt himself... More >>>