The People’s Secretary \ Zhang Qing (2011)

“Liang Zhifu as a Party member regards the wellbeing of people under the heaven as his duty. He remains committed, with a strong sense of responsibility and mission, to working wholeheartedly for the interests of the people.”

The People’s Secretary was an artistic challenge to state power, a single-channel installation inspired by Chinese Communist Party propaganda and filmed using closed circuit television cameras. By re-engineering propaganda techniques and the aesthetic of surveillance systems it was an unnerving reflection of how much of our daily lives security cameras capture, audit and scrutinise.

Born in 1977, Zhang Qing is one of the prominent Shanghai experimental artists, now he works and lives in Shanghai. Early stage engaged with performance art of absurdity and humorous violence, then evolved into a sophisticated interpretation of video and installation, his work articulates the blurred boundary and route between reality and fiction, absurdity and reasonableness. Quoted from Harald Szeemann, “Vehicles bordering on the absurd – that is the strength of Zhang Qing. At the same time he is concerned with defaulting perception by way of exaggeration.” Since 2006, Zhang Qing has deployed the perspective of surveillance as his artistic language until now through the study of video, installation and mixed media. He manoeuvres these differentiated medium, techniques and rendering methods for his individualistic art perception and contemplation.