Zhang Peili

Born in 1957 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China, Zhang Peili is a pivotal artist in Chinese contemporary art and a critical figure in video art worldwide. Zhang received an MFA in oil painting from Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art), Hangzhou, in 1984, and was affiliated with the ’85 New Wave movement, showing in the historic Chinese avant-garde exhibition at the National Art Gallery of China, Beijing, in 1989. Zhang helped start the new media department at the China Academy of Art in 2003. In 2012, he became director of OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shanghai, a leading nonprofit center for video and new media.

A pioneer of new media, Zhang experimented with video and video installation in the late 1980s and 1990s and has explored digital formats and immersive multimedia installations since the early 2000s. His early videos focus on the repetition of specific, often futile actions—washing a chicken, breaking and repairing a mirror, scratching exposed flesh—which are rendered bizarre through extreme close-up shots and framing. An early proponent of conceptual art in China, he has grounded his work in a critique of the ideology and methodology that perpetuate systems of social representation, especially language and meaning. Zhang’s video works are also about time; their deadpan banality and serial structure use the medium to both record and evince durational time as the most basic fact of existence.

Widely recognized as the first Chinese work of video art, 30 x 30 (1988) records Zhang sitting on the floor, repeatedly breaking a 30-by-30 centimeter mirror, and gluing it back together. The video was shot and shown during the Huangshan Conference, in which China’s most experimental artists and critics planned the show China/Avant-Garde (1989) at the National Art Gallery (now National Art Museum of China), Beijing. Zhang’s repeated motions in a tightly cropped frame create a sense of time and labor wasted, making the participants aware of their own habituated professional routines that doomed their avant-garde aspirations.