 ou can often judge the strength of a video work by how quickly it plunges a single image into the viewer’s eye. Such unforgettable images sear the retina like a sharpened machete, sink permanently into the mind. In his latest solo show – comprising two new works and a retrospective – video artist Zhang Peili brandishes that singular image.
It occurs in the first piece that viewers see when they enter the space: a two channel video, entitled “Happiness”. The two channels are projected onto two separate planks facing each other, and viewers stand between the planks to view each channel. Both channels play a different version of the 1970 Cultural Revolution classic, Shipyard, a good vs. evil movie that revolves around the proletarian struggles of Shanghai shipbuilders.
Viewers may be inclined to pull up a chair and watch the original film showing on the first plank in its entirety, but the real drama in this work plays out on the second plank. It loops a short scene from the original film, in which a character at the shipyard gives a speech to frenzied applause from an audience who could not be more zealous. It is on this second plank that the sharpest image penetrates: a young lady with revolutionary eyes, on the verge of tears, competing in expressive intensity with the likes of Mei Lanfang. She looks heartbreakingly naïve and passionate.
But the real irony of the piece unfolds only once you start to listen. The applause of the audience, thanks to a little tweaking by the artist, constantly interrupts the speaker. We sense that the audience is not offering rational approval. As participants in a mob mentality, they swallow hook, line and sinker whatever pours from the speaker’s mouth. However much we admire the beauty of the actress, the machine-gun like cadences of the speech, the unified energy and rhythm of an audience in rapture – at last we are stung with a suspicion that these people are automatons, pumped by an intellectual fervor that approaches animal energy.
Entitled Phrase, this show marks Zhang Peili’s first Beijing solo effort in over ten years. In addition to “Happiness”, the exhibition includes one other new video work, also entitled “Phrase”, as well as a comprehensive retrospective of Zhang Peili’s video art, a genre he began experimenting with in the late 1980s with pieces like 30 x 30 (1988). He is rightly recognized as the earliest exponent of Chinese video art.
30×30
1-5Last Word
1-3Happyness
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