Exhibitions
Unfolding the 'Real': Two Recent Video Works by Zhang Peili
Francesca Dal Lago
A continuous thread in Zhang Peili’s oeuvre since the early 1990s is the ongoing attention to the subversive potential found in the narrative fabric of well-known images of authority: using this material he acts as a saboteur vis-a-vis the normally accepted meaning of a given representation by tampering with its presentation, editing or form of display to expose the intrinsic absurdity of rhetorical structures. Since Water: Standard Version From The Dictionary Ci Hai (1992) or even from some of his earlier paintings, Zhang has appropriated ready-made images found in his immediate surroundings in order to mess around with their primary message. In Water – a video whose idea derives from the painting 1989 Standard Pronunciation (1991) made of three superimposed canvases scrolling the untuned TV image of China’s most famous news-anchor — the same anchor reads in her trademark official inflection the entry for the word ‘water’ from the best known Chinese encyclopedia, the Sea Of Words (Ci Hai). The artificial intonation and the power-play immediately prompted by the orthodoxy of the speaker clash with the apparent nonsense of the text and subvert her iconographical authority by exposing the absurdity in her attitude. Through the calculated misinterpretation of iconic symbolism normally employed to validate a specific political discourse, Zhang Peili deconstructs that very discourse by juxtaposing the ‘right’ image with the ‘wrong’ cluster of words.
Similarly, in Endless Dancing — a video installation created for the 1999 Asia-Pacific Triennal — Zhang compares the aesthetically polished dancing style of two international waltz athletes with the plainer sight of ballroom dancing now popular in China. Couples relentlessly swirl in a dark ballroom, their image juxtaposed to the pirouettes of the two professional dancers, the karaoked words of a fierce patriotic song to whose notes the performers are dancing scrolling on the lower side of the monitor. Again the juxtaposition of apparently unrelated structures of meaning (the lightness of dancing with the heaviness of the militaristic tune) uncovers the absurdity of the everyday by focusing on an unlikely and yet ‘real’ coexistence of systems.
In recent years the subversion of accepted forms of political or historical interpretation through atypical montages of film or TV clips has become this artist’s main preoccupation. While in previous works — such as Uncertain Pleasure (1996) and Eating (1998) — he has adopted the form of repetitive loops and multi-monitor juxtapositions to aestheticize humble bodily functions such as eating or scratching to the level of rituals, from the beginning of this century Zhang Peili has focused on similar processes to demystify the accepted values associated with revolutionary cinematic works, like he does in his two most recent productions now on view at the Institute of Modern Art.
In Actor’s Line (2003) — an excerpt from the 1964 movie Sentry Under Neon Lights — two male characters on the subliminal space of a Shanghai bridge are portrayed during an intense exchange on the ideological hesitations experienced by the younger man. What originally was a moment of revolutionary re-awakening is transformed into a heartfelt revelation of same-sex desire by the obsessive repetition of the editing pace. The body language and the charged looks of the two men are heightened by their lines which in one case uncannily refer to such physical proximity as the mixing of bloods and the bonding of hearts. The rediscovery of a revolutionary commitment turns into the unambiguous expression of male-to-male attraction, fuelled by explicit gestures of body contact such as arms reaching around shoulders or sliding over the chest. Painful is not the aspiration to spiritual enlightenment in a moment of hesitation, but the acceptance of a contested sexuality. The eye accustomed to revolutionary fervor may think of it as a blasphemous association, yet at the end of the loop one is bothered by contradictions that have debunked, to say the least, the authorial and authoritarian power of the image and exposed the potential for an ’other’ view.
In Last Words (2004) a similar technique is adopted in the repetition and compulsive slow motion of movie quotes from the 1960s and 1970s featuring the repeated sacrifice of heroes and heroines of all status, age and gender. The protagonists relentlessly exhale their last breaths in conditions that join endurance with vulnerability, and highlight the unwavering heroism of the actors through an evident disposition to die. Triumphant tunes and shrieking sounds consistently emphasize the climatic tragedy while delicate beauty and visual joy are evoked by the slow motion of the last moments of the heroes’ lives: one starts noticing the conventional movements, the abrupt shutting of eyelids, the reclining of heads, the muscles suddenly emptied of vital energy. Repetition inexorably exposes the artificiality of the act of dying in romantic revolutionary style, revealing similarities in different deaths and bringing ridicule to the uniqueness of this extreme moment. Slow motion magnifies the absurdity of the acting, and so does the repetitive music accompanying every last sacrifice. From the way they die, we can assume everybody is dying for the nation, the army, the revolution. Yet the blown up sight of their every gesture and expression, paired with the tragic yet useless statements accompanying: their sacrifice subvert the symbolism of the representation and expose the filmic illusion: this process inevitably spills over to reveal the artificiality of the utopia prompting such heroic acts. Observing an endless sequence of last words and breaths exhaled in the midst of fighting and wars, we are confronted with the thin veneer of the representation and the purposelessness of a language that go beyond the acting to include the ideological structure justifying these sacrifices.
Vision is as subjective as thinking and likewise is ideologically conditioned: it sometimes just suffices to look from a different angle or just another time to detect that thin layer of illusion which is often enfolding the ‘real’.