Shenzhen’s multi-use culture and arts centre is set to welcome a retrospective solo exhibition from a luminary of China’s contemporary art scene, reports Info Guangdong. Scheduled to open at Sea World on 23 March, Zhang Peili: The Remaining Poetic invites audiences to experience more than two decades of the artist’s transformative video artworks.
Known as the father of video art in China, Zhang produced one of the earliest pieces in the medium with 30×30 (1988), a 180-minute video that challenged conventional visual language of the time. The piece captures Zhang repeatedly breaking – and then gluing back together – a mirror measuring the titular 30×30 centimetres. This futile effort becomes even more disorienting through Zhang’s use of perspective, close-ups and framing.
Like 30×30, much of Zhang’s work leverages absurd presentation to imbue everyday objects and fragments of daily life with critical force, inviting audiences to reflect on far larger questions of society and human existence.
Zhang began his career as a painter, graduating with a degree in oil painting from Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now the China Academy of Art) in 1984. He quickly emerged as a prominent figure in the ’85 New Wave movement, considered the birth of Chinese contemporary art, serving as a core member of the ’85 New Space and the Pond Society, which he co-founded.
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With his work exhibited at major exhibitions and art museums around the world, including the Venice Biennale and the MOMA in New York, Zhang has helped elevate the profile of Chinese artists on the international stage.
He has also contributed to the development of the next generation at home. In 2003, Zhang initiated new media art education in China with the founding of the new media art department at his alma mater.
Zhang Peili: The Remaining Poetic offers a retrospective on this pivotal figure in Chinese contemporary art, featuring 17 selected multimedia works, including six new pieces. In capturing Zhang’s journey, it also reflects the broader development of the medium he helped pioneer in China, video art.
The exhibition runs until 21 July.
