Take a closer inspection on his latest canvas, the viewer will find that Zhang’s “hero on stage” could never be a real hero in reality, instead they are mostly the ignored subjects in life. For example, a broken paper case, a red small plastic chair, a bonsai with only leaves, a piece of branch, a container, a cigarette end, toilet, a closestool, or “a manure pit” that our editor calls, the vulgar man and women, all these are the plainest and the most common things in life. But that’s real life. Zhang kicks out those beautiful, elegant, noble and social celebrities off the stage, while he puts the ugly, vulgar and off-stream onto his stage to be the hero or star where they perform the stunning beauty. Zhang’s revolution relates to cruelty. Such cruelty doesn’t lie in the original characters thrown away from stage by him, but those heroes that shouldn’t belong to the stage. In this content, Zhang is against the culture or conscious of main-stream, perhaps this goes that the man has to earn a living in Shanghai while he was born and grown up in the northern part in China.

(part of an article on Zhang Enli, written for  <YangCheng Evening Daily>, 2006 wanglilifromchina@hotmail.com)