Қытай граффити суретшісі Чжан Дали

Chinese graffiti artist

Zhang Dali (, born 1963, in Harbin, China) is an artist based in Beijing. Zhang trained at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and Design, where he graduated in 1987. After his studies, he moved to Yuanmingyuan as a freelance artist (1987–1989) and started to show his works in independent exhibitions. He spent the years 1990–1995 in Italy, where he came into contact with graffiti art. He was the only graffiti artist in Beijing throughout the 1990s. His works cross a multitude of techniques including painting, sculpture, photography, and installations. In the four decades of his career his works were shown in more than 300 exhibitions all over the world.

From 1995 to 1998 he spray painted over 2000 giant profiles of his own bald head on buildings throughout Beijing, placing the images alongside chāi (拆) characters painted by the city authorities to indicate that a building is scheduled for demolition. The appearance of these images became the subject of media debate in Beijing in 1998. He has shown work internationally in many exhibitions including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, International Center for Photography in New York City, Les Rencontres d'Arles festival in France (2010), 18Gallery in Shanghai, Magda Danysz Gallery in Paris, Courtyard Gallery in Beijing, Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo, the 2006 Gwangju Biennale in Korea and Pékin Fine Arts in Beijing. He is represented by Pékin Fine Arts in Beijing, Kiang Gallery in Atlanta, Klein Sun Gallery in New York City and Base Gallery in Tokyo. In more recent years, his works were shown in large retrospective exhibitions such as: "From Reality to Extreme Reality" at the United Art Museum in Wuhan (2015), "Body and Soul" at Beelden aan Zee in The Hague (2017), "Meta morphosis" at Palazzo Fava in Bologna (2018).

AK 47 is the name of an automatic rifle designed by Michail Kalashnikov, from whose name comes the abbreviation of AK (Avtomat Kalashnikova) and was produced for the first time in the Soviet Union in 1947. All over the world, the name AK 47 has become a symbol of wars, insurrections and gang criminality. Zhang Dali started to use this tag during the nineties in his graffiti as a synonym of the violence permeating the fast urbanization process. From the year 2000, he started a series of portraits emerging from the chromatic contrast of "AK 47"s' shades. The paintings are acrylic on vinyl, a material widely used for advertisement boards, a feature becoming an integral part of the Beijing’s urban landscape in those years. The faces are copied from portrait photos Zhang Dali found in a pile of abandoned photo studio archives, sold in bulk at the flea market. The acronym is not painted on the faces, but it is used to portray the faces themselves: violence is not “on” people, it is the very material with which people are made of, not a washable coating, but integral part and connecting tissue of their existence.

Zhang Dali's research on human bodies as a collective depository of an era continues in this series of sculptures, cast in fiberglass from migrant workers. From 2004 to 2010, he has reproduced the bodies of farmers coming into the city in search of work; they became the document of both a specific period in the history of urbanization and a migration of unimaginable proportion. From the first exhibitions, the sculptures were hung upside down, to express the absence of control these people have on their lives. The name Chinese Offspring demands us to reflect on the present condition of a People who had lost the values of the wise men and heroes of the past, a People reduced to a sub human state, cogs in a machine on which they have no control on, lacking ideals and without a purpose that goes beyond daily subsistence.

A Second History was created in a seven year span, from 2004 to 2011. Zhang Dali poses questions about the influence of new technologies on the visual mass culture and as a form of exercised power. The research on the history of image manipulation takes him to collecting thousands of illustrated volumes, magazines, and newspapers from the years 1950s to 1980s. He had access to the archives of some of the most known state publication houses, where he compared negative films and images published in those years. This work consists of the archive created by Zhang Dali after seven years of researching and cataloging. It is made of 133 panels, each comparing images as published with different manipulations and/or their original negative. Image manipulation was born with photography itself. All over the world images are manipulated, in China such practices have been particularly pervasive since the foundation of the People's Republic and is exposed in this work in its political and aesthetical significance.

These sculptures in white marble (hanbaiyu) created in 2015 and 2016, represent a new stage of research and elaboration on the relevance of the human body as representative of a society and its dominant ideology. Bodies of common people, migrant laborers are shown to the public as classical statues made of marble, material associated to deities and heroes of the past. In this new form, they transmigrate from impermanence to permanence, at the same time detaching from their daily reality of ignorance and suffering. Zhang Dali captures the spark of eternity presented in the life of each and every person. It is not the appanage granted to royals and nobles, Sublimity exists in everyone and transforms the bodies into monuments.