Towards an Uncertain Reading of the Art of Zhang Peili
Z
hang Peili (b.1958) is an artist and academic who lives and works in the historically important city of Hangzhou on mainland China’s south-eastern seaboard, close to Shanghai. Since the mid-1980s, Zhang has made one of the most significant and lasting contributions to the field of contemporary art in mainland China; first as a painter, then as a conceptual/site-specific artist associated with the experimental Hangzhou-based art group Chi She (the Pond Society), and latterly as mainland China’s first video artist. Alongside his work as an artist, Zhang has also pursued a successful career as a teacher and academic administrator at the prestigious China Academy of Art in Hangzhou where he currently serves as head of the academy’s new media department.
Zhang’s contribution to the development of contemporary Chinese art is significant for two reasons. First, as one of the initiators of ‘avant-garde’ art in mainland China during the early to mid-1980s (a movement often referred to as the ‘’85 New-Wave’), he helped to develop—along with artists such as Shu Qun and Wang Guangyi—a highly simplified and expressionless style of painting that departed radically from the academic realism and rural sentimentality of the officially accepted Chinese art of that time. This style, which is often referred to as ‘rational painting’, can be understood to offer a detached critique of the heightened sense of alienation that had by then begun to take hold in the major urban centres of mainland China as a result of the modernisation/industrialisation ushered in by the adoption of Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Opening-Up and Reform’ policies in December 1978. Second, following his participation in the somewhat inconclusive site-specific experiments of Chi She, in 1988 Zhang broke new ground... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline