ZHANG DALI (NE EN 1963) Lot n° 4

AK-47 (37),2002 Acrylic on canvas, signed, dated and titled on reverse 100 x 80 cm 39 3/8 x 31 1/2 in. ZHANG DALI  Born in 1963 in Harbin, China, Zhang Dali is an artist who “seeks ways to express reality beyond reality”. As visual artist and photographer, he studied Graphic Arts in Beijing in the 1980s, and became known as one of China's first urban artists. As a teenager during the Cultural Revolution, Zhang Dali's art is tinged with his social convictions. Since the 1990s, and by means of ideograms painted in black on the walls, he enamels on nearly two thousand buildings qualified as ruins by the administration, drawings of his face in profile. His art tends to highlight the social changes that China has undergone in recent years. Zhang Dali's increasing popularity in the 2000s prompted him to explore more media and expose the precarious conditions of workers. "Executioners and victims are one in a world where morality and balance are absent”. As a symbol of this exacerbated violence, the artist develops an emblematic series of his work; AK-47, in reference to one of the most deadly weapons that is. A series of portraits on vinyl canvas, stained with the graphic "AK-47".