When Sotheby's held its auction of Chinese art in 2006 and grossed $13 million for works by the likes of Xu Bing, Ai Weiwei, and former enfant terrible Zhang Huan, capitalism's thirst for the Middle Kingdom's contemporary art suddenly became obvious to far more than a few collectors and curators. Chinese artists are now bona fide stars because they command the cash at auction to make them so. The recent retrospective of Zhang Huan's early performance art and later sculptural works at New York's Asia Society marks another watershed for the 43-year-old farmer's son from Henan province who first shocked the Chinese art world by staging a fake-blood-drenched piece called Angel in the courtyard of the National Art Museum of China in Beijing in 1993, and who later strode through the streets of Manhattan dressed in a muscly bodysuit made of meat, looking a little like Yukio Mishima on his way to an abattoir.

Zhang's delightfully absurd video-taped stunts have been conducted across the world: He has swung himself in a giant ball across a church square in Santiago de Compostela, lain on a bed of ice at P.S. 1 in Queens hoping to melt it with his body heat, and — most famously of all, in a 1994 piece called 12 Square Meters — sat in a public latrine in Beijing covered with honey and fish oil while filming hundreds of flies nibbling at him. Art writers, always in search of "transgression," have loved every minute. Zhang's code is a little simpler. "Being alive," he writes, "is the most important. Life is the priority." Elsewhere he notes more dryly that, "I wanted to kill myself but was not able to do so."

In his own writings, in fact, Zhang's cutting tone recalls Dalí's perpetual astonishment at the reactions of his own body to various phenomena of nature. He is cool, scornful, curious, and surprised as he ponders why his body cannot melt ice or why he feels anxiety when his face is painted over with Chinese folktales or eaten alive by flies. Like Dalí, he seems to be driven by a calculating but animal morbidity.