[1] Born in Beijing, China, in 1952 to a wealthy family, Zhang Wei grew up in the old style courtyard home of his paternal grandfather—a successful businessman—with his mother and siblings.
Soon after Zhang Wei traveled to America to participate in Avant-Garde Chinese Art, an exhibition organized by Michael Murray from Vassar College.
Zhang and his friends fought their ‘first amendment right’ fervently up to the Supreme Court, where in 2003 their art was recognized as a protected form of free speech, a precedent that still has validity today.
Zhang's first complete retrospective showcasing his abstract paintings from 1979 to 2012 took place at Boers-Li Gallery in Beijing in 2012, initiating a trend of rediscovering the dawn of Chinese contemporary art.
Heavily influenced by his experience working at a Peking opera a theater, his abstract vocabulary is characterized by a blast of vibrant colors reminiscent of the movements of actors in their flamboyant traditional costumes.
In 2016, Hong Kong's M+ Museum of Visual Culture acquired four of his earlier works from mid-1970s and 1980s from Uli Sigg, the renowned Swiss collector of Chinese contemporary art.