MORTALS INDEX 2020 | ZHANG PEILI
Mortals Index 2020
Collision Model No.1, 2021
Total Fat Volume, 2019 and X?, 1987
Bones and Organs, 2019
Collision Model No.2, 2021
19-O004, 2019
ID Number, 2021
Passport No.1 and No.2
Collision Model 2, Detail
Full Set of Bones and Data About
19-O001, 2019
Image Report, 2019
Opening Reception | March 27, 2021
Exhibition | March 27, 2021 through June 27, 2021
Venue | Beijing Center for the Arts, No. 1 Jade River Courtyard, Ping An Ave, Dongcheng district, Beijing
Zhang Peili’s new Solo Exhibition, Mortals Index 2020, opens on March 27th hosted by Beijing Center for the Arts and co-organized by Rén Space.
The title “Mortals Index 2020” encompasses Zhang Peili’s works from the last five years of practice. During period of 2014-2019, the artist traveled widely with Rén Space to Japan, US and Europe to research and experiment with digital technology and adapted them as new tools to create a new form of his artistic expression and language. Moving with ease and fluency in wide and diverse visual forms, including video, sculpture, photograph, and electronic as well as mechanical and kinetic installations, Zhang Peili utilizes a wide spectrum of medium including marble, onyx, jade, resin, ceramic, paper, fabric, metal, and light.
Notable in this series of work is the use of artist’s own self and all of body parts to the exact scale and measurements. The process began with precision scanning of his own physical body and indexing of every single bones, organs, and bodily fluids. The final work provided an encounter and dialogue with the audience at his premiere show of this series at the Rén Space’s The Annual Report on OCD in 2019.
The global health threat of Covid 19 that followed a few months after this solo exhibition opening is a yet another uncanny illustration of Zhang Peili’s prescient ability to capture the sense and mood of the time. Included in this exhibition at BCA, his two new kinetic installations, Collision Model No. 1 & No. 2 are in continuation of the series which began in 2019 and highlights the moment of time we are currently living through. The intense and almost compulsive collision in these kinetic installations manifest the encounter between the body as the internal and the world as the external, and attempt to document time and history in dialectical ways.
Following his artistic practices and approaches since the ’85 Art movement, Zhang Peili continues to persist in his deep interest and concern for the human nature and its social condition. This exhibition also includes the X? series, a painting work portraying medical rubber gloves, courtesy of the Taikang Insurance Group INC, and works on lithographs from his 2014 residency at the fabled Tamarind institute in New Mexico.