China’s father of video art Zhang Peili unveils commissioned ‘A Day’ video installation at Tai Kwun

In the eyes of the father of video art in China, Zhang Peili, a day represents the smallest fragment of life, where the nature of existence imbues the highly repetitive mundane with temporality.

The eight-channel video immersive installation “A Day” — which surrounds viewers in F Hall Studio at Tai Kwun —  explores themes of time, mortality, and the mundane repetitions of daily life through a semi-narrative visual experience. 

Zhang combines first-person footage with surveillance camera imagery, news videos, medical visuals, and AI-generated content to create what he describes as an exploration of “the impermanent essence of everything.”

In A Day, aimless scenes of skin peeling, obstructed movements, and futile everyday observations appear repeatedly as flashbacks.

They play at constantly changing speeds and camera angles, then lose momentum until the camera ultimately falls, a metaphor for the deviations in psychological states and social norms experienced during illness.

In addition to the videos, A Day incorporates 3D-printed segments of a wheelchair integrated throughout the work—whether in first-person perspective footage captured from the wheelchair or the smashed wheelchair at the video’s end.

The wheelchair symbolizes passivity and evokes a contradictory psychology, Zhang explained, recalling memories of his parents using wheelchairs.

These experiences have shaped his stance on life and illness: a sense of helplessness coupled with hope for health.

“The wheelchair is a temporary ordeal and encounter in human life,” Zhang said.

The physical wheelchair also serves as “evidence” of the video’s existence, representing the coexistence of imagery and tangible objects, echoing his earlier work Live Report: Hard Evidence No. 1 (2009).

A Day also features an instantly recognizable sound that appears intermittently throughout the video: the ending theme music of Xinwen Lianbo, the daily news program broadcast by state-owned media and an inseparable part of life for generations of Chinese people.

Zhang said the piece, Songs of Fishing Boats at Dusk, sounds “positive and peaceful” to him.

He shared that his personal feeling toward the song stems from the way that, no matter how many different events unfold in various corners of the world as reported in the news, the same familiar music always resolves the complexity and brings everything to a calm, unified close.

Beyond exploring differences and similarities in human lives, Zhang mixes everyday footage with AI-generated images to create an alternative sense of reality in A Day.

This marks another experiment with technology following his use of it in At Sea, which was exhibited at Beijing’s Red Brick Art Museum in 2024.

Only a small portion of the footage, including some everyday scenes and sunsets, is AI-produced. As Zhang explained, he used the technology solely to generate images that could not be captured otherwise due to restrictions.

While acknowledging that technology offers convenience for artists, Zhang said he is neither enthusiastic nor resistant to new tools, maintaining a “reserved and pragmatic attitude” toward AI.

Zhang Peili graduated from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now the China Academy of Art) in 1984. In 2003, he established the new media department there, marking the earliest new media art education program in China.

In 1985 and 1986, Zhang organised and participated in the ’85 Xin Kong Jian (’85 New Space) exhibition and the artist collective “Chi She” (Pond Society). His first video work, 30×30 (1988), is widely regarded as the earliest video artwork in China. Since then, he has explored themes of the mundane, absurdity, futility, and repetition.

A Day is the third commission in the DigiRadiance series, a digital program that transforms F Hall Studio into an immersive project space. The exhibition is open to the public free of charge until February 20.