Jiang Zhi was born in 1971 in Yuanjiang, Hunan Province, and graduated from the China Academy of Art in 1995. His artistic practice spans photography, painting, video, and installation, while fiction and poetry have also been integral to his creative journey since the beginning of his career. He has long been deeply engaged with various contemporary social and cultural issues, consciously positioning himself at the intersection of poetics and sociology, and focusing on how familiar aspects of everyday social and personal experience can be transformed into artistic expression.

In 1997, Jiang Zhi borrowed a friend’s camcorder to create Fly, Fly, his first-ever video artwork. The video captures a woman’s arm mimicking the motion of a bird’s wings, gliding through an apartment in sync with the rhythm of the music. The grainy texture of the black-and-white footage, combined with the setting of a modest old apartment, evokes a sense of nostalgia for the 1990s. Amid the everyday scene—scattered cups, plates, and an unmade bed—the artist conjures an almost fairy-tale sense of transcendence. This poetic and luminous work encapsulates the emotions of young people from that era: despite the struggles and frustrations of reality, there remains a longing and hope for transcendence. Video holds a distinctive place in Jiang’s artistic practice. As one of the earliest Chinese artists to experiment with video as a creative medium, he embraced its potential to offer new ways of observing and perceiving the world, leading him to develop an innovative artistic language and methodology.