Zhang Dali: Under The Sky
Pékin Fine Arts Hong Kong presents Zhang Dali’s latest cyanotypes and figurative sculpture on exhibit for the first time in Hong Kong. Zhang Dali, China’s most well known graffiti artist, stopped tagging buildings marked for demolition and construction in 2006. Today, he continues his fascination with the immediacy of the street, using a variety of mediums, including photography, cyanotype, resin and fiberglass life-size body-cast sculpture.
In Beijing and throughout Asia, economic reality and government policy work together to push city dwellers away from traditional homes at street level into high- rise concrete apartment blocks. Artists including Beijing-based Zhang Dali record this remarkable transformation, with outrage, concern, helplessness, and finally, wry resignation. Zhang Dali’s practice is research-based, recording his daily encounters with the urban space around his living and working neighborhoods situated on the outskirts of Beijing, and surrounded by vacant lots slated for redevelopment.
His aim – whether graffiti or cyanotype – is steadily consistent: immediate contact, unalterable, direct impressions of every day life at street level. Like the original shadowsubjects of the cyanotypes and the full body casts of his sculpture-figures, the works he produces are close to real life: unique, unreproduce-able, defying current trends of multiplication of original artworks. Zhang Dali’s artworks are in the following public collections: MoMA Museum of Modern Art, New York; International Center of Photography, New York; Asia Society, New York; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; 21c Museum, Louisville, Kentucky; Saatchi Gallery, London; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan; Smart Museum, Chicago; and Nasher Museum at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. Selected solo exhibitions include “Zhang Dali – World’s Shadows”, Ludwisburg Kunstverein, Germany; “A Second History”, MACBA – Museum of Contemporary Art, Buenos Aires, Argentina; and, “From Reality to Extreme Reality” – Zhang Dali Retrospective Research Exhibition, United Museum, Wuhan China.
