Red Brick Art Museum will present the recent works of artist Zhang Peili on October 30. Curated by ZHANG Ga, ZHANG Peili marks the largest-ever staging 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 unique ambiguity. Implicit in the dynamics of repetition and variation, as evidenced in his pioneering video work 30 x 30 from the late 1980s, was already the artist’s foresight of the grid to evoke temporal seriality. Such formal strategies further evolved in works like Landscape with Spherical Architecture, in which the artist filmed an array of thirty-six equidistant photographs, generating both spatial and temporal progression systematically through human intervention.

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—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.

In ZHANG Peili, 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, and bemused by the truncated characters that confound wisdom and common sense.

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

ZHANG Peili’s grid systems are thus part of a larger-than-life megastructure——In repetition, it intensifies; through redundancy, it permutates; 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.


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 “30×30” (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 Art Museum; Centre national des arts plastiques; Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum; Daimler Art Collection; DSL Collection, K11 Art Foundation, and By Art Matters Museum, Hangzhou, among others.