Zhang Peili

Red Brick Art Museum presents the recent works of artist Zhang Peili. Curated by Zhang Ga, Zhang Peili's survey marks the largest solo exhibition to date by the artist, a pivotal figure in Chinese contemporary art, and features kinetic, video, and interactive installations ranging from monumental structures to vernacular objects created in recent years.

Across his 40-year career, Zhang Peili’s work has been anchored by a recurring motif: repetition, often executed with ritualistic precision and imbued with characteristic ambiguity. Exacting in its execution yet multivalent in its signification, Zhang Peili’s repetition is further complicated by the notions of redundancy and recursion. Beneath this trinity of formal apparatus lies the mobilization of the grid system—sometimes expressed as a singular reticulation, other times manifested as a network of matrices, or articulated through architectonic, sonic, or somatic iterations that diverge from conventional grid systems.

Zhang Peili’s grid—akin to his emergence as one of the progenitors of the Chinese avant-garde at the height of 85 New Wave — is also an immanent necessity rooted in the anti-representational imperative of the modernist tradition, which, as art critic Rosalind Krauss argued, is accentuated by an underlying grid system fundamental to the inner logic of the historical avant-garde. Grids in Zhang Peili’s oeuvre serve both as a formal device for de-pictorialization, and as an expression of psychic impulse and reactive frameworks.

In the exhibition, we encounter propane tanks hurled by a formidable velocity of rotation and vertical force, suggesting a heightened temporal grid of repetition. In another piece, a matrix of tanks swerves in rhythmic redundancy, morphing into infinite rippling through reflections in the flanking mirror panes. A colossal assemblage of nested lattices provokes a recursive escalation of involution, while a vast sounding mattress, activated by constant audience participation, reverberates through underlaid grids of actuators. We are awe-stricken by towering projections of human faces, pulsating in intermittent throbs of dazzling light, and bemused by the truncated characters that confound wisdom and common sense.

A grid—an accretion of interlocking lines both horizontal and vertical, as well as a serial undulation of events, forming a framework that organizes, segments, and defines both space and time and their psychic repercussions. The grid embodies a complex network of relations, in which each intersection signifies a point of potential interaction or conflict, a moment when new departures crystallize within an otherwise undifferentiated continuum.

Zhang Peili’s grid systems are thus part of the entanglement within a larger-than-life megastructure, at once a grid system of coordinates that institutes order, a hyperbolic grid of psychic affect that deviates, and a topological wireframe of velocity that distorts. In repetition it intensifies, by redundancy it permutates and with recursion it reconstructs. The grid both ensnares and sets free his artistic whims, engendering in the viewer, whether consciously or unconsciously, somatic responses and psychological reciprocities.
 

About the artist
Born in 1957 in Hangzhou, Zhang Peili graduated from Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art) in 1984, where he later taught as a professor. He is also the former executive director of OCAT Shanghai.

In 1985 and 1986, Zhang Peili organized and participated in the"'85 Xin Kong Jian" ('85 New Space) exhibition and artist collective "Chi She" (Pond Society). His work "30x30" (1988) is considered the earliest video artwork in China. In 2003, he established the new media department at China Academy of Art and thus started the earliest new media art education in China.

Zhang Peili has participated in the Venice Biennale, la Biennale de Lyon, the Sydney Biennial, the Gwangju Biennial, the Busan Biennale, etc. Zhang has held solo exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; and the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art, Gent. His works have been collected by prominent institutions such as Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum, New York; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Art Institute of Chicago; Asia Society; Singapore Art Museum; Queensland Art Gallery; M+Museum, Hong Kong; Fukuoka Asian ArtMuseum; Centre national des arts plastiques; Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum; Daimler ArtCollection; DSL Collection, K11 Art Foundation, and By Art Matters Museum, Hangzhou, among others.

About the curator
Zhang Ga co-organized and curated the Beijing International Media Art Exhibition and Symposium (2004–2006) in the early 2000s, introducing the latest global media art practices and theorization into mainland China. He curated three editions of the Media Art Triennial at the National Art Museum of China (2008-2014). Other notable exhibitions include Motion Is Action: 35 Years of Chinese Media Art (By Art Matters, 2023), Topologies of the Real (MoCAUP, 2023), The 6th Guangzhou Triennial (co-curator, 2018), Machines Are Not Alone (Zagreb Contemporary Art Museum, 2018), unREAL: The Algorithmic Present (co-curator, HeK Basel, 2017), Datumsoria: The Return of the Real (ZKM,2017) and Wrap Around the Time (co-curator, Nam June Paik Art Center, 2016). In 2024, he curated solo exhibitions of South Korean artist Yunchul Kim and Chinese artist Wang Yuyang respectively. He has edited several books and written numerous catalogue essays. Zhang Ga is Distinguished Professor at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts and also directs the Chronus Art Center in Shanghai.