Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. Zhang Peili is not the benevolent patriarch of your little well-ordered artistic world. No, this man is rather the chief saboteur, the one who introduced the virus of temporality into the closed circuit of Chinese art. Since his first video experiment in 1988, he has been relentlessly dismantling, piece by piece, all your aesthetic certainties with the surgical precision of a mad watchmaker.
The artist born in Hangzhou in 1957 possesses this rare quality: he is mortally bored with himself. Where others might have capitalized on their status as the “father of Chinese video art,” Zhang prefers to sabotage his own legend. He rejects this label with a mix of irony and annoyance, describing it as “entertainment” in a 2019 interview. Imagine: you create a work that consists of filming for three hours a mirror being broken and repaired in a loop, and when your fellow artists demand that the projection be sped up because they are bored, you know you have hit on something. This is exactly what happened at the 1988 Huangshan conference with 30×30. The self-proclaimed avant-garde couldn’t even last ten minutes in front of this test of patience that turned time into raw artistic material.
This calculated perversity has its roots in a childhood marked by physical fragility and the medical world. His parents worked in a children’s hospital, and young Zhang, often ill, developed an early morbid fascination for clinical processes that runs through all his work. In his childhood memories, he evokes those long hours spent drawing on a blackboard while the other children played outside. This early seclusion forged a relationship with the world filtered by distanced observation and obsessive repetition. The latex gloves in his “X?” series (1986-87) are not just a conceptual fetish: they embody the artificial membrane between the sterile world of scientific observation and the organic chaos of reality. These hyperrealistic canvases of absent hands, floating in monochromatic voids, already anticipate the radical dematerialization of his future practice.
Zhang’s strategy is to introduce “mechanisms of constraint” into the artistic experience. In his unpublished theoretical text from 1989, he outlines his totalitarian vision of art with disarming frankness [1]. The conditions he sets forth, suppression of the spectacular, strict rules of engagement, forced participation, recall less democratic utopia than Bentham’s panoptic architecture. His Procedure of “Ask First, Shoot Later”: About “X?” (1987) pushes this logic to the absurd: twelve pages of delirious instructions dictating how to look at his paintings, for how long (between 23 and 33 minutes exactly), under what clothing conditions (no red, yellow, or green allowed). It’s Fluxus revisited by a sadistic bureaucrat, but with this major nuance: the instructions came after the creation of the works, making their application impossible. This very impossibility is the true purpose of the work.
Zhang’s perverse genius lies in his ability to transform surveillance technology into an instrument of artistic alienation. Water: Standard Version from Cihai Dictionary (1991) features Xing Zhibin, the news anchor who announced the Tiananmen events in 1989, mechanically reciting the definition of the word “water” from the dictionary. The irony is chilling: the one who embodied the official voice of power becomes an automatonemptying language of all substance. Zhang transforms the media icon into a semantic zombie, creating what he himself calls a situation where “the words are true but have no weight.” The device is all the more disturbing because it was made with the cooperation of Chinese Central Television, demonstrating the artist’s ability to infiltrate and subvert the very institutions he critiques.
This obsession with mechanical repetition reaches its peak with Document on Hygiene No. 3 (1991), where the artist methodically washes a live chicken with soap for interminable minutes. The banal act becomes an absurd ritual, a coded commentary on the government hygiene campaigns of the time. The chicken, whose shape subtly evokes the contours of China on maps, moves from rebellion to docility under the artist’s hands, dressed in a striped shirt reminiscent of a prison uniform. A transparent metaphor? Perhaps. But Zhang excels in this art of suggestion that never resolves into a univocal message. The artist himself insists on this interpretive openness, stating that he prefers to create “elastic spaces” rather than rigid declarations.
Zhang’s philosophical approach falls within an existentialist tradition that evokes Samuel Beckett more than Eastern wisdom. In Last Words (2003), he compiles the death scenes from revolutionary propaganda films, creating a funereal litany where heroism dissolves into repetition. The last words of the martyrs, emptied of their context, become an absurd chorus that recalls Beckett’s characters condemned to speak to say nothing. Beckett wrote: “I can’t go on, I must go on.” Zhang, on the other hand, films the impossibility of this continuation, the infinite loop of gestures emptied of meaning. This kinship is not coincidental: Zhang shares with the Irish writer this fascination for the exhaustion of possibilities, for those moments when language and gesture turn against themselves.
The installation Uncertain Pleasure (1996) pushes this exploration of alienated perception even further. On ten simultaneous monitors, a man scratches himself from every possible angle, transforming an intimate gesture into a fragmented spectacle. Voyeurism becomes a system, uncertain pleasure multiplies and contradicts itself across the screens. Zhang creates here what he calls an “architecture of surveillance,” where the viewer is both observer and prisoner of a device that implicates them despite themselves. This work prefigures our era of generalized surveillance with troubling prescience.
Later, with Collision of Harmonies (2014), Zhang even abandons the image to create his first sound installation: two vintage megaphones slide on rails, emitting harmonious chants that turn into deafening feedback as they approach each other. Dissonance as the natural condition of all harmony. The work functions as a perfect metaphor for contemporary communication: the more we try to get closer, the more the message becomes distorted in the noise.
What sets Zhang apart from his Chinese conceptual contemporaries is his stubborn refusal of transcendence. While Huang Yong Ping uses the philosophy of the Yi Jing (the Chinese Book of Changes) in his art and Xu Bing explores the spiritual dimension of Chinese calligraphy, Zhang prefers to remain anchored in the concrete and the everyday. His works are machines for producing discomfort, devices for revealing the fundamental absurdity of our social protocols. His art evokes less Eastern wisdom than the behavioral experiments of Burrhus Frederic Skinner, a Skinner who had read Kafka and decided that the laboratory rats were us. This experimental dimension is manifested in his working method itself: Zhang describes himself as a “parasite” of technologies, exploiting the unforeseen flaws and potentials of the media he uses.
The political dimension of his work remains deliberately oblique. Happiness (2006) juxtaposes in a loop a speaker and his audience applauding frantically, but Zhang isolates and desynchronizes the elements until the collective enthusiasm appears as an autonomous hysteria, disconnected from any cause. The crowds no longer respond to the leader; they are caught in their own emotional spiral. It is the psychology of the masses revisited by a clinical entomologist. Zhang, however, refuses any univocal reading: “I do not make directly political art,” he asserts. His work operates rather by slow corrosion, revealing the mechanisms of control through their very exaggeration.
In his recent works, Zhang introduces interactivity, but a trapped interactivity. Lowest Resolution (2005-2007) presents a sex education video that pixelates as the viewer approaches. The more one tries to see, the less one sees. Technology becomes complicit in self-inflicted censorship. It’s brilliant and perfectly sadistic. This work illustrates what Zhang calls “the impossibility of proximity,” a recurrent theme in his work that questions our mediated relationship to reality.
Zhang’s evolution towards mechanical installations like A Necessary Cube (2011), a huge bag that inflates and deflates like a monstrous lung, confirms his vision of art as a pathological organism. His machines breathe, sweat, malfunction. They embody this “bare life” that Giorgio Agamben spoke of, reduced to its minimal biological functions [3].
What makes Zhang so disturbing is that he refuses the comfort of clear positions. His video art is neither purely critical nor cynically complicit. He inhabits this uncomfortable space where repetition is both torture and meditation, where surveillance becomes contemplation, where the absurd rubs shoulders with the sublime. This fundamental ambivalence is perhaps what brings him closest to the contemporary human condition, caught between control and freedom, between meaning and nonsense.
In 2003, he founded the New Media department at the China Academy of Art, training a generation of artists in his methods of methodical sabotage. But even in this pedagogical role, Zhang remains faithful to his philosophy of productive constraint: he teaches less techniques than strategies of resistance, less knowledge than ways of questioning. His students learn that art is not expression but experimentation, not communication but short-circuit.
Zhang Peili does not free us, he locks us into increasingly sophisticated devices. But in this very confinement, he reveals something essential about our contemporary condition: we are all willing lab rats in the generalized experiment of Chinese modernity. And the worst part is that we ask for more. His works function as consciousness traps, forcing us to recognize our complicity in the systems of control that we denounce.
His latest project, using medical scanners to reproduce his own organs as marble sculptures, literally dissecting himself, pushes the logic to the extreme: the artist becomes literally transparent, his entrails exposed as ultimate ready-mades [4]. It’s magnificent, it’s repugnant, it’s pure Zhang Peili. The digital data of his body is translated into stone, creating what he calls “bones made of stone,” a material tautology that perfectly summarizes his approach: transforming the obvious into enigma, the banal into unsettling strangeness.
Because at the heart of all this conceptual machinery, there is always that sickly child fascinated by medical instruments, turning his traumas into artistic protocols with the rigor of an engineer and the cruelty of a poet. Zhang Peili is perhaps the only contemporary artist who manages to be both clinical and visceral, cerebral and carnal, minimal and baroque. He does not seek to resolve these contradictions but to exacerbate them, creating works that are both scientific experiments and psychological torture sessions.
This is why Zhang Peili remains indispensable: he spares us nothing, especially not ourselves. In a world of art obsessed with communication and affect, he persists in creating zones of opacity, short-circuits in the machine of meaning production. He is a terrorist of perception, a bureaucrat of the absurd, a clinician of our collective pathologies. And that’s precisely why we can’t look away. His works act like cognitive viruses, infecting our way of seeing and thinking long after we have left the exhibition space. In the ecosystem of contemporary Chinese art, Zhang Peili occupies the position of the necessary pathogen, the one that prevents the system from closing in on itself.
Zhang Peili’s greatness ultimately lies in this rare ability to transform boredom into revelation, repetition into negative epiphany. He shows us that the most radical art is not the one that shouts the loudest, but the one that knows how to orchestrate silences, blank spaces, dead times. In a world saturated with images and messages, he creates spaces of resistance through slowness, repetition, obstinacy. He is a master of conceptual karate who uses the force of the opponent, our own impatience, our thirst for meaning, against ourselves. And it’s magnificently unbearable.
- Zhang Peili, “由一则新闻想到的……” (From a news item…), unpublished text, 1989, cited in “阿特网” (“Art Network”), 2012.
- Samuel Beckett, L’Innommable, Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1953.
- Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue, Paris: Seuil, 1997.
- The Paper, “对话｜张培力：用石头制造的骨头诠释了数据和雕塑的转化” (“Dialogue | Zhang Peili: Bones made of stone interpret the transformation of data and sculpture”), 2019.
