Josep Soler i Casanellas

Zhang Peili

Zhang Peili (张培 Born in 1957 in Hangzhou). Zhang Peili earned his reputation as the father of video art in China for his response to an invitation to create a new work for the historic Huangshan Conference on modern art in 1988. He borrowed video equipment – which was, at the time, hard to come by – from friends at the customs bureau and used it to film his latex-gloved hands breaking a mirror and then meticulously gluing the shards back into place.

He is beginning with the cool and contained painting of the mid-1990s and then moving into the aesthetics of boredom and control in his first video projects.

Zhang Peili is an enigmatic figure: while he is widely respected in China as a pioneering video artist and a progenitor of the use of electronic media in the wake of the 85 New Wave movement of the mid-1980s, his international reputation relies primarily on a small number of survey exhibitions. In 2011 one of his early paintings was auctioned for a shocking HK$23 million during the controversial Sotheby’s sale of a portion of the Ullens Collection in Hong Kong.

The recognition of Zhang Peili is less than their counterparts likely due to use video and installations in their work.

Probably why their work is one of the most abstract of all the collection and maybe the translation in his own words by an interview:  “What I felt during the early stages of my development as an artist was that there is a kind of underlying force or power. Sudden changes or disasters, which have been caused either by nature or human beings, made me realize that people live in an illusion, and this feeling has become stronger as my career as an artist has developed. All these beautiful and supposedly stable states are so fragile. They are just illusions. Changeable and destructive states are inevitable. THEY are the realities”.

Other and former works: