Thursday
10Mar2005
Beijing's mysterious graffiti
Thursday, March 10, 2005 at 10:45AM 
In the mid 90s graffiti featuring these bald heads started appearing in Beijing. People used to wonder who the vandal was. It was not so much of vandalism as the bald heads appeared mostly on old houses that were being torn down to make way for Beijing's new high rises. This went on for couple of years. In 1998, a local artist Zhang Dali came out and revealed himself as the graffitist. Zhang said it was his idea of carrying on a conversation with the city.
Here is another one of Dali's work.
You can see more of Dali's and other Chinese modern conceptual photographers at the Asian Civilization Museum(Armenian Street) Singapore. The exhibition is called "Over One Billion Served:Conceptual Photography from the People¹s Republic of China"
Some other peices from the exhibition:
This peice called ""Knickknack Peddler" by Wang Qingsong is a recreation of a Song Dynasty scroll shown below.
This one is by Zhao Bandi, he has many such pictures with his panda.
Reader Comments (1)
Dear Preetamrai:
I am a writer and PhD student at New York University.
I wanted to request your permission to use some of your images of Zhang Dali's work as illustrations in a short piece I am writing for a Chilean newspaper on 798 art space in Beijing.
Would it be possible for you to send me larger versions of the files so they can be published?
Sincerely yours,
Fernando