 ou can hardly discern the passions of an initiator of new things in Zhang Peili. The 49-year-old artist is dressed in a fine-striped sweater and a pair of jeans. He is seated on a couch at Bernini's coffee house in Hangzhou, washing down his favorite drink: strong Italian coffee.
For those who don't know, Zhang Peili is one of China's most important artists, the so-called "father of Chinese video art." He is also one of the country's most important arts educators in his role as dean of New Media Department at the China Academy of Fine Arts, one of the country's elite art instititutions. He has been teaching at the Academy for 22 years.
"I worry about basic survival needs, so I have no idea what I would do if I quit the college," he says. 
He seems accustomed to hiding behind a serious and noble appearance. But when speaking of how he produces art, he says it originates from a kind of “crazy enthusiasm” and the “charm of the art language itself.”
Zhang had long been reputed as “one of the earliest contemporary art experimentalists in China” and “the first video artist.” Art critics like Wu Meichun, Wang Mingxian and others claim that Zhang “originated a restrained expressionism” and “initiated a calm and reasonable analysis.” Holland Cotter, a cultural reporter for New York Times, has called Zhang’s work “clean, witty and obscure.”
Some of the world’s leading arts establishments, like Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Pompidou Art Center in Paris and the Fukuoka Asian Fine Arts Museum in Japan have all acquired Zhang’s video works for their permanent collections. And major collectors like Uli Sigg, Guan Yi and Guy Ullens have his work.
He has also been invited to the Venice Biennale three times and has the honor of being the only Chinese artist who has ever held a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Zhang first became active in contemporary Chinese art circles in 1980s. He and other artists like Geng Jianyi formed something called the “Pond Society,” which emphasized art experiences. He also planned the ’85 New Space Exhibition in Hangzhou. And he actively tried art media like installation and performance art. Then, articles about Bai Nanzhun, the “father of photographic art,” which was published in “Translations in Fine Arts,” motivated Zhang, who was exploring other art forms, to choose a unique form of his own. (See film clip at bottom of this page)
Out of his hands came the maiden work of Chinese video art in 1988. That work, titled “30×30,” was monotonously dull: In a lengthy video, Zhang patiently broke a mirror to pieces, stuck the pieces together and then broke it again, performing this drudgery repeatedly and boringly for three hours.
The jarring noise from shattering glass and close-up of hands’ breaking and sticking acts were endless, challenging the curiosity and patience of viewers. Though many critics didn’t believe till today that “30×30” was ‘video art’ in a strict sense, Zhang held firmly that the work had distinguished itself from current practice of videotaping performance art.
“I was just trying to create an extremely dull work,” zhang says, leaning back in his sofa and quietly recounting his original conception eighteen years ago. In late 1980s when TV became popular in urban Chinese families and sharp-sighted artists found inspirations from this mass entertainment tool, Zhang attempted to use images devoid of values to test the public’s reactions.
“30×30” had no shooting cuts from the very beginning of its conception,” he says. “And this was not intended to pursue a video language but to produce a visual fatigue, or a meaningless video language.”
The first showing of “30×30” caused some controversy during the “Meetings at Huangshang Mountain.” Someone advised him to reconsider some technical problems like shooting techniques, while the artist Wang Luyan pointed out excitedly to him on the spot that he “felt it no use to create any more at sight of it.”
The boring and prolonged shot, fixed use of camera focuses and positions, and shooting of repeated acts, all typical of “Zhang’s video language,” once it was initiated, rapidly influenced a group of artists in their early practices with video: Qiu Zhijie in his first video “Work No. 1” in 1992 wrote relentlessly on a piece of Xuan paper the essay “Preface to Orchid Pavilion” 50 times (in another performance art piece of the same name, the writing act lasted three years and was undertaken 1,000 times); Yan Lei in his 1993 work “Resolution” also focused the shooting on hands that were repeatedly performing dull acts of weaving string patterns.
Facing the succeeding mass of new media artists, Zhang was well qualified as the initiator and leader of time.
The art critic Lin Zhonglu insightfully concluded that Zhang’s style was a “cold treatment that curbs subjective emotions.” During the interview, his vivid account of his boyhood revealed it was by no means accidental that he developed such a temperament.
Zhang Peili was born in November 1957 to a medical family in Hangzhou. His father taught at Hangzhou Medical University and his mother was a professional midwife in the hospital’s department of gynecology and obstetrics. Growing up in such a family, he led a childhood somewhat different from ordinary children. Zhang jokes that his parents came back home every day with smells of formalin and tincture of iodine respectively, and the dinner talk always involved various complicated medical terms.
Zhang says he was thin and weak in his childhood. “If I had not been born in such a family and attended to professionally, I might not have been able to lead a sound life till today.”
 Influenced by a medical family, terms like nervousness, sensibility, enthusiasm and innocence often applied to artists could hardly be used to describe him. Zhang, who learned to draw as a child and was admitted to China Academy of Fine Arts at the age of 23, always retained a personal style of prudence and reason.
In a small-scale 1991 contemporary art exhibition held in an underground parking space on Hengshan Road in Shanghai, Zhang showed his second video work, “Sanitation Document No. 3,” which was also the first piece of video art publicly shown in China. Zhang, "televised" for the second time, wore a striped prison uniform and repeatedly washed a hen in a wash basin with soap and clean water. Washed over and again by force, the hen fluttered in protest but to no avail; the hen had to follow the washing act, standing up or squatting down mechanically like a wound device.
The voice-over man near the end of the video was reading a newspaper announcement about the “patriotic sanitation campaign.” Considering the background of the time, when the entire nation was engaged in comparison and appraisal of sanitary cities, “Sanitation Document No. 3,” satirically titled in a government document formula, acquired a strong sense of social allusion.
“Man has been bound by various beautiful reasons since early in his life,” Zhang says. “I want to reflect on a forced state of life.” Zhang, teaching in Hangzhou Industrial Art School after his graduation from college, battled the school’s leaders on his first days of work. The free and untamed ways of artists did not fit easily into the rigid rules and regulations of the school. That recollection of that experience makes him indignant even to this day; and it may be one reason he thought deeply about "coercion."
Compared with his college classmates like Wang Guangyi in Beijing, Wu Shanzhuan, now of Shanghai, Zhang always felt content to exercise his influence locally. The fact that Zhang lived in Hangzhou, a city with strong traditional art atmosphere, didn’t curb his exuberant passions to create; nor did it hold back his brisk steps out of this country. A series of video works like “Project No. 1,” “Children’s Fun Park,” “Standard Version of Water versus Dictionary,” “Related Meter” and “Doubtful Pleasure” were all staged successively during the same period. Meanwhile, he also created general installations and photographic works, and even resumed his painting, creating a number of political pop-like oil paintings.
In late 1990s, two of his overseas cooperative galleries, Art and Public Gallery in Switzerland and Jack Tilton Gallery in America helped introduce Zhang to academics and collectors of new media art. He made huge gains.
In 1999, he showed his works in Venice, Berlin, New York, Jerusalem, Fukuoka in Japan, London, Vancouver and Queensland, Australia, almost making a yearlong smooth-running international tour.  Today, one of his video works sells for as much as $40,000.
“The peripheral identity of Hangzhou in contemporary art enabled artists there to retain a relatively calm profile,” Zhang says. “Periphery is really critical to artists.”
With the development of computer networks and visual technology, and after the silence and low state of avant-garde art in 1990s, "new media" became the art form vigorously followed by young generations of artists. Zhang, who has now been invited to “direct” the first department of new media arts in the domestic fine arts colleges of China, also changed his customary ways of shooting one scene to the uses of ready-made video and film products.
In works of “Actor’s Lines,” “The Last Words,” and the newly created “Short Phrases” and others, Zhang has made selective uses of parts of the revolutionary films shot in 1960s or ‘70s. After the pieces are edited and pieced together, the familiar contexts and scenes were utterly deprived of meanings ingrained in images. And the removal of symbols signifying a particular narration time wiped out readily the specific corresponding feelings and tokens in viewers’ mind. Then the new interpretations were full of diverse allusions to the present reality, looking extremely absurd.
“Going from shooting to editing was actually like talking to myself; now, it is like a dialogue with time,” Zhang says, feeling a little tired after a second cup of coffee, countless cigarettes and a lengthy talk.
His first solo art show at home finally arrived last November. On the opening day at Currents Art and Music Gallery in Beijing, the posters were all signed full with the names of artists and visitors who came to applaud and view his works.
 Now, he is busy modifying and polishing last year’s work, “Short Phrases,” in preparation for the Basel art expo later this year. Talking about his new work, Zhang seems to recover his strength. In his plan, he would employ a very small liquid crystal screen and play a hide-and-seek game with viewers: the closer viewers stand to the screen, the obscurer the picture and sound of the video are; the picture and sound turn clearer only when viewers stand beyond six meters; but due to the size of the screen and the control of sound volume, viewers can not see or hear the content of the video at all; viewers have to find a good position to see the blurred image and hear the faint sounds. This seems to be symbolizing man’s guess at some secrets beyond his full understanding.
“All of my works involved positions. Not all people will readily accept them after viewing them, but equally, not all people will reject them,” said Zhang, a vague expression of innocence and slyness characteristic of artists showing on his serious face.
“I’m also looking for such a position.” He turned meaningful again the minute he rose to part.
Top Image：Happy
Image 1：Homework
Image 2：Taiji Series
Image 3: 30*30
Image 4：The last words
Image 5：Sanitation Document No. 3
Image 6：Dictionary
Image 7：Take Food
Image 8：Gladness
translated by Huzhu
http://artzinechina.com/events/zhangpeili/
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