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REPETITIVE STRESS
By Charlie Finch - 17 January 2008
"So Zhang Peili is the Chinese Douglas Gordon?" I flippantly asked whimsical dealer Jack Tilton last Friday night. "Douglas Gordon has heard of Zhang," Tilton replied, "and he's too edgy for Larry Warsh." Zhang's new show at Tilton's uptown boîte restores some mental heft to the China craze, which Tilton started 15 years ago and now admits that he is priced out of. Zhang's work is a deep pond of meditation on the crimes of the Chinese state, emphasizing a single repeated act as synecdoche for the submission of the Chinese people.
Two new video installations in the Tilton show reiterate Zhang's obsessions. One, titled Happiness (2006), juxtaposes sexy headshots of Chinese film stars, all of whom resemble Brad Pitt, with the idiotic clapping and robotic smiles of the masses. View it for awhile and your teeth begin to ache.
The other work, Last Words (2003), seminally splices together tragic denouements of Chinese propaganda films of the 1950s and '60s, in which smiling peasants happily lay down their lives for the collective good. One bit of a young fellow taking a gun to his head, grinning all the time, is particularly chilling. Zhang seems to imply that the death wish that characterized the world's oldest civilization for so long, at the cost of 750,000,000 lives, still lies close beneath the skin, and that he, a man of 50, will not forget or let you forget.
Contrast the clips in Last Words with their exact filmic contemporaries, the films of Andy Warhol. The close-ups of noble heads dreaming of the dark side are eerily similar. No transcendence, just a happy grave, by the gun or the drug.
While the figures in Zhang's loops are familiar to the Chinese, they are anonymous to the Western viewer, but that will change, as Greater China becomes the template of the world. Zhang seems to ask if his people are ready for such dominance and at what price.
Source: www.artnet.com
Zhang Peili: Last Words
Zhang Peili's Last Words is a remaking of old Chinese patriotic movies. He extracted numerous scenes of communist heroes gasping their last words before dying, from those 1950s and 1960s revolutionary fictions, which were once the only entertainment during the Cultural Revolution and almost every scene of which was deeply rooted in the memories of the generation from that time. He then assembled the extractions into a loop of 15 minutes.
Zhang Peili screened his movie in a dual projection format; one shows the normal sequential play of the assemblage, while the other show is a reversed play of the same assemblage, simultaneously. Viewers see the heroes dying on one screen and rising from the dead on the other, which is an incisive pastiche of a well-known phrase from the revolutionary era - "heroes are immortal". Last Words interrogates, in an ironic fashion, the patriotic discourses and semiotics, which have been woven into the very fabric of the modern Chinese politics and culture.
Zhang Peili examines and re-tailors the representations of heroes of a recent past, and is apparently aimed at upsetting our firmly settled memories. And indeed those fragments that used to be so familiar to us reappear in Last Words with an inexplicable sense of absurdity and emptiness, as a long cycle of death, an endless process of dying and undying. The strange kind of death, the cinematic death and resurrection manifest an intriguing paradox of cinema, in which one dies thousands of times and yet one never really dies.
Source: 11/08/2006 - www.defne.typepad.com
