INVALID PRINCIPLE - An interview with Zhang Peili

Fu Xiaodong (F): How do you understand “reality” and what kind of relationship do you have it? Are you the person concerned or just a by-stander, if so, why?

Zhang Peili (Z): The words opposite of “reality” are imagination, illusion, dream, memory, history, and surrealism. These words show that “reality” is of the present and directly linked to time.
About “reality”, one could further associate terms like “face the reality”, “take the right attitude towards reality”, “cold reality” and so forth. So we can see, “reality” is different from words that concern phenomenon, surface, environment, incidents, situations, accident, confrontation, sentiment, feeling, and human relations and so on. Comparatively, phenomenon, environment and the words like these seem to be something partial, individual, accidental or temporary, while “reality” seems to be more so stable, persisting, complicated, and even conceptual. Perhaps we can say that the word “reality” is generated from phenomenon, surface, environment, incidents, situation, accident, confrontation, sentiment, feeling, and human relation and so on. “Reality” remains hidden somewhere among all these words. All people are the “concerned persons” of “reality”, though he or she may choose to act as the “by-stander”. “Reality” is both the course of experience and the result of experience. Thus, all reactions to “reality” are of these “concerned persons”.


F: In your work you have appropriated images from vintage films of the Chinese revolutionary period. These works include “testament”, “actor's lines”, “joy”, and so on. You once said that “these frequently watched movies are very important to me”, you felt very excited when you found them all of a sudden after such a longtime of being forgotten. What from your memory and reality strikes you the most in these films? What do they mean to you?

Z: I regard memory as a material, an element, as if it were a photographic image. Humans are living their lives through their own memories, reality and illusions. And the course of forming new experiences is a process of mixing and confusing the past and present. To me old films represent memory and time. They have the ability to define the principles of their own unique periods in time. What I am most interested in are these principles and their connection to memories. It is a process of deconstruction and dissolved the past into an understanding of time.


F: Apart from 2000, there happened to be some changes in the subjects in your works. Specifically, you started using more movies from the revolutionary period. What was the reason for this? I perceived that your interest had shifted to the ideologies behind historical periods. Also, what types of role do politics play in your work?

Z: Revolutionary films are related with memories, and even today they still constitute some special meaning for many people. What I care more about is the mode of language that these old films presented. This mode of language was a system of signs based on principles that have always existed in human minds. And through this system a film could influence and determine the thoughts and behaviors of all the people who watched it. These influences affected every aspect of an individual’s daily experience, as well as their views on politics.


F: Can you say something about your work “Slow 3, Fast 3, Slow 4, Fast 4”? Where did the idea come from? What are you working towards, or what do you want to say?

Z: I try to confuse dream, memory and reality. I try to testify that in the world many unrelated things are all around us, and in fact that our lives are being mixed up everyday.


F: Would you please say something about how you select the images and material in your works, and what is the meaning and sentiment expressed by those images, sites, presentations and processing methods selected?

Z: I think I do not hold any principles in my works; at least I haven’t made any principles for myself. To me, art work is not a concrete thing, it is full of contingency. In my work, principle is invalid.Some of my works may have something to do with some sentiment and meaning, but I would just as soon become tired of it. And other times I will do something unrelated with sentiment, or something of no significance.