Red Brick Art Museum will present the recent works of artist Zhang Peili on October29. Curated by ZHANG Ga,ZHANG Peili marks the largest solo exhibition 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 characteristic ambiguity. 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 system—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 systems.
ZHANG Peili’s grid—akin to his emergence as one of the progenitors of the Chinese avant-garde at the height of 85 New Wave—is also an immanent necessity rooted in the anti-representational imperative of the modernist tradition, which, as art critic Rosalind Krauss argued, is accentuated by an underlying grid system fundamental to the inner logic of the historical avant-garde. Grids in ZHANG Peili’s oeuvre serve both as a formal device for de-pictorialization, and as an expression of psychic impulse and reactive frameworks.
In the exhibition, 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, pulsating in intermittent throbs of dazzling light, and bemused by the truncated characters that confound wisdom and common sense.
A Grid—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 systems are thus part of the entanglement within a larger-than-life megastructure, at once a grid system of coordinates that institutes order, a hyperbolic grid of psychic affect that deviates, and a topological wireframe of velocity that distorts. In repetition it intensifies, by redundancy it permutates and 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.
