Zhang Dali

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

Zhang trained at the Beijing Central Academy of Art & Design [1].

After studying painting in China, he went to Italy, where he discovered graffiti art. He was the only graffiti artist in Beijing throughout the early 1990s, and is the first artist since Keith Haring and Jackson Pollock to be given the cover of Time magazine.

He has shown work internationally in many exhibitions including “Between Past and Future” at the International Center for Photography [2] in New York, “Me! Me! Me!” at Courtyard Gallery [3] in Beijing, “Beijing in London” at the ICA [4] in London, “HOT POT” at Kunstnernes Hus [5] in Oslo and “Fever Variations” at the 2006 Gwangju Biennale [6] in Korea. He is represented by Chinese Contemporary [7] in London, Kiang Gallery [8] in Atlanta and Base Gallery [9] in Tokyo

Zhang Dali, also known as AK-47 and 18K, makes art that questions the official face of contemporary Chinese society through graffiti, sculpture and installation. As a young man, Zhang was a successful painter in a more traditional and acceptable way – abstract canvases and playful interactions with the characters of the Chinese language – however, he grew despondent with the lack of impact his work had in galleries and turned to graffiti in order to make his art more visible. Zhang’s best known project is ‘Dialogue’ in which he sprays stylised outlines of heads on condemned buildings around Beijing. This tagging highlights the swiftness with which the past is being turned to rubble in an attempt to transform the city into a modern metropolis at the sacrifice of almost all traditional architecture. Zhang hopes that by marking these buildings as individuals – essentially giving them an identity – he can maintain their memory after demolition; the project encompasses not only the tagging and its documentation by the artist, but includes press coverage and pieces of the actual buildings collected by Zhang. The resulting archive is a testament to China’s vanishing heritage. Zhang sees denial, distortion and destruction of cultural fact everywhere: other work includes casts of the bodies of illegal migrant workers strung upside down and numbered like prisoners. Deprived of official status yet responsible for most physical changes to the country, these people occupy both the highest and lowest position in Chinese society; Zhang gives them a voice.