May 7, 2018
Zhang, Peili is considered the father of Chinese video art for his three-hour video 30X30 (1988). He is also as an influential educator who started the New Media Department at China Academy of Art in 2002 where young artists such as Hu, Weiyi, Lin, ke, Lu, yang among many others graduated from.
This episode starts with a re-discovery of his 30X30. The work depicts the artist breaks a mirror and glues the pieces together. Although being labeled as the first Chinese video art piece in China, the artist’s intention behind the work has been ironically covered by its fame. Firstly, in today’s talk, it is actually called a “failure” by Zhang as he actually planned to lock the audience in the room, forcing them to stay with the monotonous or “meaningless” time of mirror gluing, and thus making obvious the consciousness of time passing. However, it was him ended up being forced to hold the video controller and keeping fast forward under the press of the audience. What made this work pivotal in contemporary Chinese art is not that it made in the video form, but the effort to engage the audience, trying to make them part of the work and thus create an experience for them which might leave some traces or make some differences in their life instead of just a pretty painting on the wall to be taken a glance of. In that sense the original intention of the work hasn’t been touched upon at all at the time. Secondly, the point is to create a period of “meaningless” time no matter what Zhang was doing. Because of the expectation of the TV media, the audience would tend to expect something happening during the event, but they would be disappointed to find that there is actually nothing happened, neither in terms of the content nor the video form, camera language or visual effect, nothing happened only except for the time passing. Zhang mentioned Waiting for Godot when asked about if he has been influenced by the Greek mythology Sisyphus. But the choice of mirror breaking and gluing has its own symbolic meaning anyway, which actually came from the Chinese idiom “A broken mirror joined together” to indicate a certain hope after the violent break. The work finally shows helplessly that a mirror can never be rejoined and reused. We didn’t dig into the political metaphorical meaning which could possibly be there, but continue to talk about the use of video instead of performance and the difference in between. Zhang dislikes the kind of showing himself of performance in front of the audience and he feels much more comfortable when facing with a camera, which means, the “mediated” time is more “natural” for him than the “real” time. From there we discussed his later works from Uncertain Pleasures (1996) to his retrospective exhibition Certain Pleasures (2001), covering the topics including the relationship between “to look at” and “to be looked at”, the visceral power of media worthy of both artistic exploration and particular vigilance.
Thank you for listening and please don’t hesitate to contact me via duansiying@gmail.com if you would like to learn more about the details of the conversation or have any suggestion.
With particular gratitude to Chronus Art Center for facilitating this interview.