Ren Space －Not Only | But Also ——Zhang Peili Solo Exhibition
［Press Release]
Opening reception: Nov, 14th (Friday),2014 5 – 8 pm
Duration: Nov,15th, 2014 ——Jan, 28th, 2015 (Daily 10 am- 6pm, close on Monday)
Rén Space is proud to present an extraordinary development of an artist who has proven to express his experience through the discovery of new artistic language. “Not Only / But Also” by Zhang Peili opens on November 14, 2014 and runs through January 31, 2015 in Rén Space, Shanghai, China.
As the first solo exhibition at Rén Space, Zhang Peili is also re-entering graphic arts after 20 years of absence in painting form. Through his new work, Zhang Peili dares us to see ‘today’ with sometimes completely new imagery and sometimes with reinterpreted iconic images of his past work.
Zhang Peili holds a strong objection to the use of over simplified artistic symbols and refuses to be labeled as such. When he was called upon as a great painter, he abandoned his well tempered techniques at its peak. As early as 1994, he turned around to challenge the broader use of creative media. Then, when people coined him as the ‘father of video art of China,’ he simply shrugged it off and threw himself into something unknown and onto an uncharted road.
In Summer of 2014, he embarked onto a new experimental collaboration with Rén Space exploring several creative languages of art which he was unfamiliar with. By using variety of medium and techniques, he created new forms of expression for him.
His new series of works convey his sense of uneasy transition of China today from a centralized and ‘harmonious society’ into a tense and disrupted fragments that manifest in violence and conflicts between individuals and groups alike. The focus of the new works show this drift in societal and personal identities. Zhang Peili further comments on this age of inter-connectivity and social unrest as a far more universal phenomenon by moving beyond the specifics of geographic location.
With the work “crime scenes,” he manipulates online images of crime scenes in South America, he reinterprets it with high powered laser carving technology and produces a set of triptych with strong visual effects. The geographical or genealogical nature or cultural background of the original image has deliberately been screened into a universal common experience of today. It challenges the perceptual and cognitive orientation and cultural reliance in the perception of the artwork. The title of the exhibition “Not only | But also” as an open proposition, will reveal to us that Zhang Peili’s reconnection with graphic arts form has expended and deepened his artistic language.
Zhang Peili was born in Hangzhou in 1957, and graduated from China Academy of Art. His is an active participant of “85 New Wave Art Movement”, and the co-founder of “85 New Space” and “Pond Society,” and an advocate of “Rationalistic Paining”. His renowned piece includes “X Series”(oil painting), Art Project No.2 (linguistic) and Focus (video installation).
