Zhang Peili’s Flying Machine and the ends of painting in Chinese contemporary art

Zhang Peili’s work is commonly seen as a steady movement from painting to video. Zhang completed what is known as the first video work in China, in 1988, and exhibited the first Chinese video art in 1991, after which he consistently worked with more complex video installations. Yet the re-emergence of the painting Flying Machine (1994)—one of Zhang’s last few canvases, and thought to be lost—reminds us that even artists such as Zhang continued to grapple with their academy training, in his case in oil painting, not simply as a technique but as a ‘language’ (yuyan 语言). In