Not Only But Also | ZHANG PEILI
Installation view
Lips of the Announcer
The Scene No.3
Ink Trace
Photographing the St. Mark's Campanile from the left and right diagonals, 2007
Nov 14, 2014 – Jan 28, 2015
Rén Space is proud to present an extraordinary development of an artist who has proven to express his experience through the discovery of new artistic language. As the first solo exhibition at Rén Space, Zhang Peili is also re-entering graphic arts after 20 years of absence in painting form. Through his new work, Zhang Peili dares us to see ‘today’with sometimes completely new imagery and sometimes with reinterpreted iconic images of his past work.
His new series of works convey his sense of uneasy transition of China today from a centralized and ‘harmonious society’ into a tense and disrupted fragments that manifest in violence and conflicts between individuals and groups alike. The focus of the new works show this drift in societal and personal identities. Zhang Peili further comments on this age of inter-connectivity and social unrest as a far more universal phenomenon by moving beyond the specifics of geographic location. He challenges the perceptual and cognitive orientation and cultural reliance in the perception of the artwork. The title of the exhibition “not only / but also” as an open proposition, will reveal to us that Zhang Peili’s reconnection with graphic arts form has expended and deepened his artistic language.