Unconventional Grids in Zhang Peili's Art

The sense of the absurd and the obsessive repetition of the gesture, metaphors of the current times, have always been at the basis of the work of Zhang Peili, a key figure in the panorama of contemporary Chinese art and global video art. The artist is the author of 30 x 30, the first Chinese video art work that showed Zhang sitting on the floor, repeatedly breaking a 30 × 30 centimeter mirror and gluing it back together. Presented in 1989 at the famous exhibition China/Avant-Garde that took place at the National Art Gallery, the video addressed some of the themes that would distinguish Zhang Peili's work in the years to come, namely the sense of wasted time and work. The exhibition at the Red Brick Art Museum presents kinetic, video and interactive installations that range from monumental structures to recently created objects. A recurring theme is the grid understood as a network or matrix of networks, metaphors of the complex form of relationships, in which each intersection indicates a point of potential interaction or conflict.