Zhang Peili is generally recognised as the first Chinese artist to use video as the main medium for his work. A leading figure of the avant-garde movement in the 1980s in China, he has developed a highly respected international career. His early video works focus on repeating mundane, often futile actions — breaking and repairing a mirror, scratching exposed flesh, washing a chicken — rendered bizarre in its use of close-up shots and peculiar framing. Zhang’s work constitutes an ongoing reflection on means of creation and production and is deeply grounded in the legacy of conceptual art. His work is grounded in a critique and examination of the methodology and ideology that perpetuate systems of social representation, especially language and meaning. Zhang’s video works are also deeply concerned with time. Their cynical banality and serial composition use the medium to record and evince durational time as the most basic fact of existence.