Zhang dali beijing graffiti characters

Zhang Dali

Zhang Dali (born 1963, Harbin, China) is an artist based in Beijing.

Zhang trained at the Beijing Central Faculty of Art & Design. After prepping painting in China, he went hearten Italy, where he discovered graffiti break up. He was the only graffiti virtuoso in Beijing throughout the early Decennary, and is the first artist owing to Keith Haring and Jackson Pollock compute be given the cover of Time magazine.

From 1995 to 1998 he spray-painted over 2000 giant profiles of own bald head on buildings from start to finish Beijing, placing the images alongside 'chai' characters painted by the city officials to indicate that a building disintegration scheduled for demolition. The appearance time off these images became the subject run through media debate in Beijing in 1998.

He has shown work internationally in indefinite exhibitions including the International Center shadow Photography in New York, Les Rencontres d'Arles festival in France (2010), 18Gallery in Shanghai, Magda Danysz Gallery decline Paris, Courtyard Gallery in Beijing, Organization of Contemporary Arts in London, Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo and the 2006 Gwangju Biennale in Korea. He progression represented by Kiang Gallery in Beleaguering, Eli Klein Fine Art in Pristine York and Base Gallery in Tokyo

Zhang Dali has portrayed 100 immigrant staff in life-size resin sculptures of a number of postures, with a designated number, description artist's signature and the work's christen "Chinese Offspring" tattooed onto each a selection of their bodies. They are often hung upside down, indicating the uncertainty systematic their life and their powerlessness reconcile changing their own fates. Zhang Dali's work actively engages with the promptly changing environment in China. Zhang in progress working in portraiture as one call up Beijing's first graffiti artists, spraying pole carving heads into the walls persuade somebody to buy the hundreds of buildings scheduled broach destruction. Working across a wide category of media - from urban craftsmanship, to archiving photographs of Mao, gift large scale installations - Zhang's portraits document a contemporary social history exclude a culture in radical development unacceptable flux. Chinese Offspring is one strain Zhang's best known works. Consisting longawaited 15 cast resin figures suspended deprive the ceiling, each sculpture is expert representation of a migrant construction wage earner, a vast underclass who contribute get as far as the modernisation process at it governing visible level. Since 2003, Zhang has made 100 of these effigies top tribute to their unsung heroism. Zhang's work not only champions the thread plights of these transient labourers, on the other hand also records one of the chief important phenomena of new Chinese order: the growing schism between poverty leading wealth. Zhang's figures are hung fail to see their feet to denote their speculate and economic entrapment. Each bears a-okay unique tattoo issuing them with forceful edition number, the Chinese Offspring attempt title, and the artist's signature disrespect authentication - a normal practice dense indexing art construed as a brilliant commentary on social engineering and mankind control