This symbol comes from my own image. It is abstracted from my own image. I use this symbol to represent the exchange between myself and this city. I want to understand the situation of this city, its changes and its structure. I call this performance of mine Dialogue. Of course, there are many formats of the exchange between the artist and the city. The reasons I have chosen this one include the point that it can very rapidly, very quickly put my works in various corners of the city.

（Statements by the Artist, 2000)

As Zhang Dali reveals in the program of this project, they hope to record not the city as an object of objective social observation or aesthetic enjoyment, but according to the ‘dialogue’– primarily, it forces his self-portrait onto the whole of society – that arises from the artist’s own subjective intervention.

What I did was to choose seven photographs from the more than four hundred that Zhang Dali gave me, and used them to highlight a public artist’s tense negotiation with a rapidly changing Chinese city over a short period of five years from 1995 to 1999. As this kind of negotiation has already become a core topic in Chinese contemporary experimental art, it reflects on an even more general phenomenon of art history through an individual case.

The second kind of ‘dialogue’ with buildings in Zhang Dali’s photographs takes place between the wastelands of the forced demolitions and the preserved ancient relics. The distinct contrast between the images shows two diametrically different attitudes of dealing with tradition. For instance, the overall surface of image no. 6 [Demolition • The Forbidden City 1998 – Editor’s note] is almost completely filled by the ruined wall of a half-destroyed house, and Zhang Dali has sprayed the image of his bald head onto the wall, and then dug this image out with an axe chisel. The rough-edged cavity looks like a fresh wound, and through this hole people can see in the distance a brilliant, mirage-like image of the golden roof of a Forbidden City watch-tower.

In an extremely simple and plain way, this photograph represents Beijing in the modern age, in particular the dual process of ‘destruction’ and ‘preservation’ experienced in the last ten years.

(Wu Hong, Zhang Dali’s Dialogue: Conversations with the City, 2000[Selected])