During the autumn and winter of 1998, New York city was witness to a heavy flurry of Chinese contemporary art.  

Driven by Asia Society's INSIDE/OUT: NEW CHINESE ART exhibition, smaller China showings helped to line the fabric of NY's fall season.  The effect of this activity manifested itself in a great many configurations. Perhaps the most convoluted of these manifestations occurred  in a School of Visual Arts Symposium entitled "Contemporary Chinese Art in America: Sweet and Sour?"  Here American style politics of identity awkwardly confronted the unsuspecting benefactors of global art, the Chinese avant-garde.  The gist of the discussions was that Asian American artists who had forever skated the periphery of the NY art world had now been washed aside by the tide of newly imported mainlanders. The argument that globalization, opposed to the reality of provincial art world politics, left no one quite comfortable with their identity in the end.   If anything was to be amassed from the symposium it was that  trans-national artistic enterprise does not necessarily take into account the intricacy of multicultural identity politics.  However it inevitably raises the question of 'whose game is it anyway?'  

Whoever holds claim to the game, the rules are changing.  

On Oct. 28, 1998 the Museum of Modern Art in NY presented their recent acquisition of a video piece by one of China's most leading artists, Zhang Peili.  This marks the first occasion that a mainland Chinese artist has exhibited, much less had a work purchased by MoMA.  Zhang's work registers a significant step in the current transitional relationship between Chinese artists and the global art world.  

Situated in the Museum's Garden Hall Video Gallery, where, far from being front and center, his work summons attention in the most satirical of ways. The Video Gallery is tucked directly adjacent to the exit of MoMA's current mammoth Jackson Pollock retrospective. Where amongst the plethora of Pollock paraphernalia and interactive computer screens, the penetrating sound of a person feeding himself clamors away.  For all the seriousness that Western art's modern Goliath may possess, his legend is defenseless against the naive mannerism this "Samsonesque" Chinese posseses.  

Zhang Peili deliberately attempts to divorces himself from identity politics.  Moving into the realm of internationalism with a theme common to us all, eating. EATING  is Zhang's video piece dating back to 1997 and already had its NY debut last year at the Jack Tilton gallery. The work consists of three large stacked monitors, each displaying a different screening of person eating a meal. The top screen shows a close-up profile of the person's masticating jaw, while the bottom screen displays a medium, overhead shot of a plate carelessly adorned with objects to be devoured. The equation set up by the two static shots above and below are consummated by the middle monitor . By using a small black and white security camera, it shows the activity of the person's hand from the perspective of the persons arm as it soars back and forth from plate to mouth.  

During the course of the video the sound of the person chomping and swallowing accompanies the image of various food items: a cucumber a hard boiled egg, two tomatoes, a piece of cake, . The menu seems arbitrary and,  far from appetizing.  It presents generic, ungarnished items to  be devoured in an almost crude fashion.    It is almost ironic that in EATING' s  introduction Zhang Peili's hometown of Zhejiang is noted for its fine cuisine.  

This piece, however, is not about the seduction of food, or pleasures of eating. Though not entirely arbitrary, this could've been almost any mundane exercise. If anything, EATING  demystifies this carnal delight to the point of scientific banality.   By concentrating on a single activity, says MoMA's Barbara London, "EATING  parses a simple everyday act into a subject object, and verb...". 

 Like much of his work, Zhang Peili manipulates semiotic structures to explore the illusory nature of (video) representation and the utilitarian limitations of our vehicles of communication.  "Water � The Standard Version", also being shown in NY at the Asia Society's INSIDE/OUT exhibition exemplifies this issue.  In " Water",  a famous Chinese TV newscaster reads the definition of water from a dictionary throughout the 20 minute duration of the piece. The delivery, content, and medium is thereby reduced to the same level.  A similar deconstructive tactic is used here upon the phases of a process. EATING , through its rudimentary equation, acts as some surreal demonstration of motor skills forming the bond between process and cognition.  The utensils, cake crumbs, and tomato juice are as extraneous as the chewing, swallowing, and burping are. All become equally vanquished of their original content, leaving only the structure.  

Zhang Peili's conceptual savvy is however, challenged  by his own choice of subject.   Given the NY art world's protocol to seek out evidence of derivation and to expect exoticism from Chinese art, an activity such as eating, so charged with cultural specificity, automatically points the viewer to the irrelevant.  This, however, is precisely where Zhang Peili intends to take you, the challenge is met.  

Although MoMA has shown film and videos by mainland Chinese artists before.  Zhang Peili is the first to have a video installation exhibited at the Museum, and the first to have a video installation acquired as part of the collection.