ZHANG PEILI 张培力




ZHANG PEILI
Biography

1957 Born in Hangzhou, China.

Education:

1984 BA obtained from the Oil Painting Department, Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, Hangzhou

Solo Exhibitions:

2008 The Tilton Gallery, New York.
2006 Phrase, Currents/Art & Music, Beijing.
2000 Artist Project Rooms, (Art & Public, Switzerland) Arco2000, Madrid.
1999 Jack Tilton Gallery, New York.
1998 The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
1997 Centers of Academic Recources Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok,
Thailand.
1996 "Video Forum"(Art & Public, Switzerland) Art27'96, Basel, Switzerland.
1993 Maison des Cultures du Monde, Galerie du Rond Point, Paris.
Galerie Crousel-Robelin, Paris.


Selected Group Exhibitions:

2006 European Media Art Festival, Germany, 2006.
2006 China Power Station Part 1, Serpentine Gallery, London.
2006 Create History: Commemoration of Chinese Modern Art in 1980s, OCT-Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen, China.
2005 L'ART DE PRODUIRE L'ART, Le Fresnoy-Studio National, France.
2005 Le invasioni barbariche, Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Italy.
2005 Shaun Gladwell / Tracey Moffatt / Zhang Peili, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia.
2005 Archaeology of the future, The Second Triennial of Chinese Art, The Nanjing Museum, China.
2004 Techniques of the Visible, Shanghai Biennale 2004, Shanghai Art
2004 Light as Fuck/ Shanghai Assemblage, The National Museum of Art, Norway.
2004 BEYOND BOUNDARIES, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai.
2004 Zooming into Focus, Contemporary Chinese Photography & Video from the Haudenschild Collection, Shanghai Art Museum.
2004 China, Video Generation, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris.
2004 Dialogues, Gu Dexin, Wang Gongxin, Zhang Peili, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, China.
2003 Z.O.U-Zone of Urgency, La Biennale di Venezia (50a Esposizione
2003 Happiness: a survival guide for art and life, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.
2003 10th Biennial of the Moving Image, Geneva.
2003 Alors, la Chine?, Centre Pompidou, Pairs.
2003 The First Guangzhou Triennial, Guangzhou Museum of Art, China.
2003 OPEN SKY, Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai.
2002 PAUSE, Gwangju Biennale 2002, Gwangju, Korea.
2001 TELEVISIONS, Kunst Hall, Wien.
2001 Living in Time ,Nationlgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum fÜr
Gegenwart, Berlin.
2001 China Art Now, Singapore Art Museum, National Heritage Board, Singapore.
2001 Compound Eyes, Contemporary Video Art from China, Eart Lu Gallery, LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts, Singapore.
2000 Open Ends, Art at the MOMA Sine 1980, The Museum of Modern Art , New York.
2000 Media Art 2000 of media-city Seoul 2000, Seoul Metropolitan (Historical)
Museum, Seoul, Korea.
1999 APERTO over ALL, La Biennale di Venezia (48a Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte),Giardini,Venice.
1999 ZEITWENDEN ausblick, Global Art Rheinland 2000, Kunstmuseum Bonn,
Germany.
1999 Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s -1980s, Queens Museum
of Art, New York.
1999 Skin-Deep, Surface and Appearance in Contemporary Art, The Israel
Museum, Jerusalem.
1999 Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery,
Brisbane, Australia.
1999 The 1st Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial 1999, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum,
Japan.
1998 Every day, 11th Biennial of Sydney, Pier 2/3, Sydney
1998 Zhang Peili and Gu Wenda, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (U.B.C),
Vancouver.
1998 Inside Out: New Chinese Art, P.S.I Contemporary Art Center, New York.
1997 La 4e Biennial d' Art Contemporainl de Lyon, Reunion des Musees
Nationaux, Lyon, France
1997 Cities on the Move 1, Group Exhibition of Contemporary Asian Art. Vienna Secession, Austria.
1997 Another Long March, Chinese Conceptual and Installation Art in the Nineties, Chasse Kazerne, Breda, The Netherlands.
1996 OE uvres Choisies, Art & Public, Geneve, Switzerland.
1996 Image and Phenomena, The Gallery of Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, Hangzhou, China.
1995 China, Artistic Avant-garde Movements, Centro d'Art Santa Monica, Barcelona, Spain.
1994 Out of the Center, Pori Art Museum, Pori, Finland
1993 Passaggi a Oriente, La Biennaledi Venezia ( 45aEsposizion Internazionale d'Art) Giardini, Venice,

Collections:

The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Centre National des Arts Plastiques, France
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan
Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena, U.S.A
Galeria Helga de Alvear, Spain.
Singapore Art Museum, Singapore.
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia.
Annie Leung Art Foundation.

Early works - 1980s

Paintings and installations



Admire the jazz musicians


 

X?-Series




X?- Series: No.4
1987, oil on canvas, 80 x 100 cm




The Report of a Type Hepatitis in 1988
1988, installation




A Report on the Hepatitis A Infection in 1988
1988, Glass, gloves, lacquer, plaster, 5 parts, 31×19cm each




X
1985, mixed media




Swimmer in the Summer
1983, Oil on canvas, 172×170cm





No jazz tonight
1987



In 1986, a group of artists including Zhang Peili, called "The Pond", secretly realized a work late in the night. They draw on a wall people practicing tai chi, on the second day local people were surprised to see their 'shadows' on the wall.

EARLY WORKS

Video



30 x 30
video, 30 min, 1988

This video features a person throwing a mirror and re-constituting it over and over.
At that time, filming techniques remained simple: editing quasi inexistant, the whole video consists in a 30 min shot of a performance...




The artist collected war film extracts of people shooting each other and edited them together...

Water: Standard Pronunciation




A newsreader read with a mechanical voice all the definitions related to the word "water" as written in a dictionary. The blue background, clothes and haircut of the journalist is the same as those seen on TV News...



Hygiene No.3
1991, video

The artist films himself cleaning a chicken....

Kindergarden
video installation, 1992





Continuous reproduction 25 times
1993





Eating
1997, video installation, 10min loop

Endless dancing
video installation, 1999







source: http://www.apt3.net/apt3/artists/artist_bios/zhang_peili_a.htm

In Endless Dancing 1999, Zhang Peili takes as his subject the image of a couple enjoying ballroom dancing in a park. At different times the voice of an instructor tells the dancers what to do, and advises of the health benefits of their activity. In China, ballroom dancing has become a popular form of socialising and early morning exercise for the elderly. To create the work, Zhang Peili fixed cameras at eight points in a circular configuration to record a range of perspectives in real time, suggesting many different realities. In displaying the work, television monitors are placed to simulate the original situation. The dancing and the dialogue continue ceaselessly, hinting at the circularity of all things, and perhaps their ultimate absurdity and meaninglessness.
Artist's statement:

Generally the cost of a video product is higher than that of a painting but lower than that of a movie. It has the elements of time, movement, sound. The arrangement of video monitors with various images can form different space effect. All of these make video rich and attractive. Nowadays no other media are more popular and common than video. You can consider it as anything, a sculpture, a painting, or an installation. You can also regard it as a moment of your life or a fragment of one of your dreams. It is a place where you can come in and go out freely. Life provides us much inspiration but videos technologe gives us much more possibility. The work to join this two pretectly together is very joyful.

Constant blow up
2000, video installation, 12monitors

Last words
2003, video installation

Lowest resolution
2005-2007, video installation

Happiness
2006, 2-channel video installation

Garden gate
diptych, 2007









Water town of venice-hangzhou
diptych, 2007

A Gust of Wind
video installation, 2008







Work realized at the Boers-Li Gallery in April 2008.
"The multi-channel video installation presented for the first time here furthers Zhang Peili's explorations of the themes of perspective and positionality evident in his prior work and melds them seamlessly with veiled but incisive social critique. The goal is ultimately to reveal the apparatus of social image construction and cast doubt on the ephemeral vision of a middle-class utopia presently offered in the media." (from Boers-Li Gallery website)

Contemporary Chinese Art: Neither Panda Bears nor Students' Homework - An Interview with Zhang Peili

by Francesca Dal Lago


Francesca Dal Lago: As a participating artist in this year's Venice Biennale, can you tell me your general impression of the Chinese art exhibited in the show?

Zhang Peili: Firstly, the number of participating Chinese artists is larger than ever before. One interesting thing that Harald Szeemann has done, is not treat Chinese art as a closed group. In exhibiting artists from China in various sections of the Biennale the individual characteristics of their work have been highlighted alongside the rest of the art. In general, I think Chinese artists have been given a fair treatment, and the choice of works has been quite representative of the latest trends. Of course, from a specialist's point of view you would have some problems with the selection, but in general - compared with previous Biennales, and also considering the curator's realistic limitations - I still think this year offers a quite good choice. As I said, an improvement is in the fact that here the tendency to group or . nationalizing. the art of China has not been emphasized.

FDL: As an artist who has taken part in 1993 Biennale (the 45th) could you tell me what differences you have noticed between showing then and now.?

ZPL: An immediate difference is the shift in artistic medium: the 1993 Biennale focused on painting, and in particular China's Political Pop and Cynical Realism. The language of the artworks exhibited in that show was quite even, with certain works being very similar to each other. By exhibiting them all together, and separated from the rest of the exhibition, their similarities appeared even stronger. This time the styles used by Chinese artists are quite varied and the works are exhibited amongst the other participants in the exhibition. This allows Chinese works to establish a sort of dialogue as far as language is concerned. Certainly the curator could not possibly forget the social and cultural background of these works, and their special character, but he has transformed it more into a question of language difference, not cultural difference. In the 1993 edition there was a large gap between Chinese art and the rest of the exhibition: in that it appeared as if Chinese artists were talking to each other, as in an internal dialogue. In this Biennale we do not find the usual . endangered species attitude. Where Chinese artists are treated as panda bears in a zoo, i.e. special cases: there is more equality, there is the possibility of dialogue with the international art world. In this Biennale the number of Chinese artists is quite large, but apparently none of the works were chosen for their very strong political ideologies or for some stereotypical themes in their work.

FDL: What do you think about the growing gap that exists between art produced in the mainland and that which is produced by mainland-born artists living abroad. Maybe for an international public there is apparently not so much difference between these two groups, but their concepts, their language, the issues they are concerned with are very different. Do you agree?

ZPL: Of course there is a very big difference between artists residing in China and those outside. In China , artists generally tend to stress their personal living experiences. Of course, these bear some social and individual elements, but they are directly connected with the everyday aspects of life. For Chinese artists working abroad, the scope generally tends to be much larger. Some become involved in topics such as: Chinese philosophy, traditional forms of artistic expression historical anecdotes, or examining Eastern philosophy, so as to discuss the possibility of a relationship between Chinese and Western cultures. This is, I think, quite different from what artists in the mainland attempt to do.

As far as the differences in artistic language, Chinese artists living outside the country- at least those who are now most successful in the Western cultural sphere - tend to use forms of expressions that are progressively more in common with each other. In China, the difference between each artist can still be quite broad, their connection still loose, they still possess a certain individual character. I am not saying this is good or bad, but it seems to me that mainland artists generally maintain more distinct forms of expression, while Chinese artists living in the West tend not to. Nonetheless, I'm not clear as to what factors have caused them to grow progressively so close in their artistic language.

As far as materials and media are concerned, many artists in China probably do not have the same working conditions or the same
possibilities, as those outside, and their connection with space and the manipulation of materials is simpler and more direct. This is perhaps, one reason why a Chinese critic living in Europe has said to me that works of mainland Chinese artists tends to look more like . student's homework. . He may be referring to mainland artist' s using space and materials in ways that are seemingly not as vast, or strong, perhaps less definite.

FDL: As an artist from the mainland who has traveled a lot and participated in many international exhibitions, do you think that an
attempt by Chinese expatriate artists to discuss through their art a possible dialogue with Western culture is successful ? Do you think they have succeeded in establishing such a channel of communication?

ZPL: In the current cultural climate, you could say this strategy appears quite successful, but I do not know at what level one gauges the "success" we are talking about. In fact there is still a quite basic ignorance of China and Chinese culture on the part of the Western art world. It's easier to accept works which are quite conceptualized, such as those dealing with traditional culture or Eastern philosophy. On the other hand, works discussing themes directly related to the reality of life in China can not be easily understood or have the same immediacy, since this public lacks a deep understanding of China's daily life. Still, I think, it is a question of time: for as knowledge of art from China increases, it will be harder to deal with philosophical and esoteric themes and to avoid discussing topics which are directly connected with China's real life experiences. Nor do I know how deep such a dialogue with Western art can go. I think all artists need to invest some part of their personal experiences in their art so to make a real difference, to create an impact. I doubt that there can be a long-term dialogue just based on very conceptualized subject
Matters.

FDL: Do you then think that in the works of expatriate Chinese artists we can't recognize any degree of personal experience?

ZPL: Certainly, there is a level of personal experience in what they are doing, but I think it's not very immediate, it is more indirect and conceptualized. It is something like a memory, a remembrance, in some case it is derived from reading books. I think the most direct element is that they live in the West and that they experience directly what it means to negotiate between cultures. Of course this is very different from living in China. I do not mean to express a judgment here, what I mean is that we have to look of the ways in which this is turned into an artistic language.

FDL: How do you think this latest Venice Biennale has had or will have an impact vis-Ã -vis the position of Chinese art at an international level?

ZPL: As far as Chinese art is concerned, I think this is all just temporary. What eventually will come out are interesting works or
interesting artists, whether or not they are Chinese, and despite their cultural background. First we always have to look at whether the art is good, and then we can look at its background. If the work is not interesting, there is no question of looking at where it comes out from, it is just not interesting art. I think the large interest obtained by Chinese art is also short term, before there was nothing, now there is a factor of novelty that counts. Nobody would find it strange if there were, let's say, twenty American or twenty French artists. Because it is quite a new phenomenon, everybody noticed the presence of twenty Chinese. In the case of other countries the public would not look at the numbers but whether or not there are good works. Where the artists come
from, it is not important.

[Interview conducted in Bolzano, on June 16 1999]