“Although BE1 looks like a purely abstract work, it is in fact based on a painting of a plantain tree by Qi Baishi [a master of Chinese traditional painting]. Zhang wiped a paint-covered rag onto the painting surface, approximating the large tropical leaves of the plantain. The poor-quality paint seeped oil onto the surface, creating a yellow stain behind the leaves that looks like a planned part of the composition, but was in fact an accident.”

“Decisive was [...] for me copying fragments of this very famous ink painter, Qi Baishi. I wanted to be him but different. And so at a certain moment I understood that it was very different to see the canvas just as a flat surface, and not as a three dimensional space to be built by the use of perspective, like a landscape or room with people in a social realistic way. The flatness was enough for me as a painter and more: Anything became possible - any shape was possible and any colour, just as colour. It opened a new world.”

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“Zhang Wei’s work essentially remains a balancing act between sometimes dissonant elements: the East and the West, movement and stillness, control and craziness, colour and form, paint and blank canvas, approximating the balance he has attempted to achieve in his life. Much as abstraction offers us a freedom from the power of external narrative, at the end of the day Zhang Wei’s work manages to give us both: a personal story to be read and the energy and fragility of his forms to be felt.”

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“ [...] In 1981, China’s first major western modern art exhibition, American Paintings from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, was held in the most prestigious official venues in both Beijing and Shanghai. The impact on Chinese modern art of the time cannot be overestimated, and it affected Zhang Wei very directly. The exhibition did more than introduce the idea of abstraction; it opened up ways of thinking about abstraction, at a moment when Zhang was searching for a new artistic grammar and synth to form a personal language from the influences in his life. Looking at the action paintings of Jackson Pollock or the calligraphic interpretations of Franz Kline, Zhang Wei was able to quickly combine those ideas with this personal framework of Chinese cultural references. [...] EXPE3 contains several layers of references, such as the influence of Jackson Pollock’s dripping technique balanced with a Chinese awareness of space or emptiness.”