Concept and Medium: China’s First Video Art Piece and Zhang Peili’s Early Artistic Creation

Abstract

This paper takes China’s earliest video art work 30×30 and the early works of video artist Zhang Peili 张培力 as the starting point of the study, exploring the relationship between the origin of Chinese video art and the “modern art movement” in the 1980s. With the language of “compulsive repetition”, Zhang Peili shifted the medium of his artistic creation from painting to video. The logic of conceptual art played a decisive role in the early development of video art, and was gradually deepened because of the development and exploration of the media language of video art, becoming the cornerstone for the development of contemporary Chinese video art.