‘Intense colours are interrupted by large sections of blank canvas. Incompatible hues come together in brutal clashes ending in a kind of calm dissonance, like an alchemic surrender between mortal enemies. Sometimes a huge canvas is occupied by only two or three strokes of a large brush, aided by a few accidental drops of paint exuding an unfamiliar attitude. There is a violent energy in many of Zhang Wei’s recent paintings, but it is not the central component of his canvas. Rather, it’s what mediates the energy that is essential. For all the brash contrast of colours and texture, what really defines Zhang Wei’s work is a sense of balance.’
C. S. Chinnery, ‘A colourful dissonance: On the paintings of Zhang Wei’, in Zhang Wei, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2017, p. 29
‘Zhang Wei has a dramatic visual language and has a strikingly self-possessed personality, the optical impact of his canvases register instantaneously. Through boldly applied paint and bright colours, the movement of the artist’s brush is visible on canvas, it brings the viewer bodily awareness – the conditions and processes by which Zhang Wei’s applied paint becomes essential to our appreciation of his works. [...] He describes his style as wu xing – spontaneous, enlightened mode of creativity. Action Painting falls under the same descriptive vocabulary. But how does Zhang Wei know when a painting is complete? He tells me that his fear is of “painting a canvas to death”. He strives instead for a more flexible sense of “incompleteness”, and in this sense, negative space in the form of the picture surface is integral to his compositions.’
L. Ambrozy, ‘Zhang Wei and Abstraction’, in Zhang Wei: The Abstract Paintings 1977- now, exh. cat., Beijing: Boers-Li Gallery, 2013, pp. 23–24
‘ [...] that painting has no beginning, no ending. You cannot see how I did it, how I finished it. In Western artistic tradition, you can trace the whole process through every part, every state. With this blue painting and many others like this, they are different from the Western concept of power in art. I borrowed that from the Chinese traditional mentality. There is this Chinese saying, “power is formless”. That’s my language too. I feel it very strongly now, that I understand both ways, the Western and the Eastern way. To take advantage of both of their strengths brings me the freedom I like.’
Z. Wei, ‘Zhang Wei - Waling Boers, Interview at Zhang Wei’s studio’, in Zhang Wei: The Abstract Paintings 1977-now, exh. cat., Beijing: Boers-Li Gallery, 2013, p. 153
‘Zhang Wei’s work essentially remains a balancing act between sometimes dissonant elements: the East and the West, movement and stillness, control and craziness, colour and form, paint and blank canvas, approximating the balance he has attempted to achieve in his life. Much as abstraction offers us a freedom from the power of external narrative, at the end of the day Zhang Wei’s work manages to give us both: a personal story to be read and the energy and fragility of his forms to be felt.’
C. S. Chinnery, ‘A colourful dissonance: On the paintings of Zhang Wei’, in Zhang Wei, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2017, p. 35
‘ [...] In 1981, China’s first major western modern art exhibition, American Paintings from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, was held in the most prestigious official venues in both Beijing and Shanghai. The impact on Chinese modern art of the time cannot be overestimated, and it affected Zhang Wei very directly. The exhibition did more than introduce the idea of abstraction; it opened up ways of thinking about abstraction, at a moment when Zhang was searching for a new artistic grammar and synth to form a personal language from the influences in his life. Looking at the action paintings of Jackson Pollock or the calligraphic interpretations of Franz Kline, Zhang Wei was able to quickly combine those ideas with this personal framework of Chinese cultural references. [...] EXPE3 contains several layers of references, such as the influence of Jackson Pollock’s dripping technique balanced with a Chinese awareness of space or emptiness.’
C. S. Chinnery, ‘A colourful dissonance: On the paintings of Zhang Wei’, in Zhang Wei, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2017, p. 33
‘Working with the opera troupe affected Zhang Wei’s creative process in various other ways. Citing colour cues borrowed from the energetic colours of the Opera costumes and make-up, in one egregious understatement he told me, “I like colours”. Zhang Wei preferred using colour since the Wuming Group era, but working with the Northern Kun Opera Troupe liberated him from the mimetic function of the image, and he began working with purely abstract colour combinations. While some of his experiments imitated calligraphy, he also boldly attempted to break free from realism, although he had never seen abstract oil painting before.’
L. Ambrozy, ‘Zhang Wei and Abstraction’, in Zhang Wei: The Abstract Paintings 1977- now, exh. cat., Beijing: Boers-Li Gallery, 2013, p. 27
‘Although BE1 looks like a purely abstract work, it is in fact based on a painting of a plantain tree by Qi Baishi [a master of Chinese traditional painting]. Zhang wiped a paint-covered rag onto the painting surface, approximating the large tropical leaves of the plantain. The poor-quality paint seeped oil onto the surface, creating a yellow stain behind the leaves that looks like a planned part of the composition, but was in fact an accident.’
C. S. Chinnery, ‘A colourful dissonance: On the paintings of Zhang Wei’, in Zhang Wei, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2017, p. 31
‘Decisive was [...] for me copying fragments of this very famous ink painter, Qi Baishi. I wanted to be him but different. And so at a certain moment I understood that it was very different to see the canvas just as a flat surface, and not as a three dimensional space to be built by the use of perspective, like a landscape or room with people in a social realistic way. The flatness was enough for me as a painter and more: Anything became possible - any shape was possible and any colour, just as colour. It opened a new world.’
Z. Wei, ‘Zhang Wei – Waling Boers, Interview at Zhang Wei’s studio’, in Zhang Wei: The Abstract Paintings 1977–now, exh. cat., Beijing: Boers-Li Gallery, 2013, p. 150
‘Zhang Wei describes his Wuming years as a period of “training”, a time when he learned to capture ambience and mood on canvas, and these early works demonstrate his colour sensibility and use of brightly contrasting highlights to offset his tableaus, a habit that evolved into one of his stylistic conventions. Such careful cultivation of a condensed passionate outpouring onto the canvas paved the way for more adventuresome deviations from naturalistic realism.’
L. Ambrozy, ‘Zhang Wei and Abstraction’, in Zhang Wei: The Abstract Paintings 1977- now, exh. cat., Beijing: Boers-Li Gallery, 2013, p. 25
‘Zhang Wei started painting in 1971, right in the middle of the Cultural revolution. Like all Chinese artists of his generation, at first he followed the realist tradition. [...] Since art classrooms were hardly the best spaces for refuge during a revolution whose aim was to change the very nature of culture itself, Zhang took to Beijing’s parks to paint their scenery and seek people like himself, those trying simply to claim a tiny sliver of personal space for self-expression. During this time, Zhang Wei encountered Zhao Wenliang and Yang Yushu, two future fellow members of the No Name Group [Wuming Group], which they would form together. [...] they showed Zhang that there was more to realism than faithfully representing reality. Their paintings revealed that reality had a poetic potential, which could be explored in terms of expressive intensities. [...] this was a moment of revelation.
[...] The art produced by members of the group [Wuming Group] may look politically tame to us today but they painted landscapes in times when painting landscapes was seen as an act of bourgeois sedition. In fact, they painted all the simple things that weren’t allowed to be painted, tethering their souls with the artists they had studied from the few badly printed art books they furtively shared with one another. During this time, Zhang Wei made works like Spring Afternoon and Antique Gold Eaves, using techniques influenced by Ma and Yang to depict the scenes they visited together.’
C. S. Chinnery, ‘A colourful dissonance: On the paintings of Zhang Wei’, in Zhang Wei, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2017, pp. 29–30
Artist Book:
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