A Tale of Metamorphosis
47
They have every kind of vitamin or supplement imaginable in
their bodies, oftentimes it’s more than their hearts can
bear. . . A body builder needs over ten years to create this
kind of effect, but I became a body builder overnight.6
In this performance where he claims the city to be his own, he becomes an
American bodybuilder, for he believes Bally Total Fitness (and other fitness
clubs in every other block of Manhattan) and its muscle-building craze reflect
the current socio-political mood of the city that requires a new facade. New
York City, which has been claimed and self-claimed to be the center of art,
music, theater, finance, and even the world in general (as filmmaker Ric Bums
proudly entitled his PBS documentary on the rise and fall of the World Trade
Center) becomes a victim of terrorism.7 Its unabashed faith in optimism and
hope seems to be shaken by the traumatizing experience of 9/11.
Understandably, the reactions that followed were about being preemptive. As
the U.S. government takes preventive measures and re-strengthens its iconic
image of the world’s only superpower as part of its relief effort to alleviate and
ease New Yorkers’ intimidations and fright, Zhang provides a commanding
facade for the city through an iconography of the bodybuilder which connotes
vigor, strength, and resilience. Beneath the powerful musculature, however,
Zhang reveals in his statement that Meat-man’s body is physically overloaded
just as bodybuilders’ bodies that appear robust are in fact medically
overburdened and stressed out. Is this disclosure his sly implication that this city
that appears so spirited might be also internally weakened?
Furthermore Meat-man’s gluttonous physique seems to target America’s
meat-oriented food culture, and the profit-driven cattle and beef industries in
particular, as well as its obsessive fascination with muscle building workouts.
The amount of meat all stitched together to form a whole human body
enlightens the viewer how our dietary system relies on the beef industry (if one
is not a vegetarian). Panic over the spread of mad cow disease and its human
analogue, the new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, did not truly grasp the
United States, compared to Western Europe. By 2003, voluntary recalls for more
than 10,000 pounds of beef took place for fear of an epidemic, two thirds of th B