Zhang Dali was born in 1963 in Harbin, Manciuria, in the north of the People's Republic of China.
In 1987 he graduated from the Peking Academy of Fine Arts.
He escaped from China in 1989, after Tienanmen Square and transferred to Bologna, Italy where he met his wife and lived for 6 years.
In 1995, thanks only to his double passport, he is able to return to Peking to undertake his first project that the artist called "Dialogue": leaving by night, hidden by obscurity, to portray on the walls of the "hutong" (old quarters in Peking which the government indented to demolish) his famous profile of a shaved head, in two but sometimes three dimensions, signing it AK 47 and 18K, initials respectively of the Kalshnikov and of gold in order to symbolise violence and economic power. By day he returned to those places and photographed his work in order to remember every corner of the city, even after it would be destroyed.
Later, in 2000, he began to paint paintings and in 2001 to make resin sculptures.
The subjects are those peasants who in 1993 began to leave the country toward Peking in search of fortune, but were stopped and sent away from the capital who bound them to the suburbs beyond the fifth ring, forcing them to a life of "migrants", without homes, food and medical assistance. Dali wanted to give these people an identity, a concreteness, in order to give them back their dignity and the right to have a place in society.
For large canvases, Zhang Dali gets his inspiration from old postcards of peasants and operators portraying their faces by the oppressing repetitions of the AK47 initial that renders their faces and their expressions almost evanescent.
For the resin moulds, he passed another two whole years with a few workers in the Peking suburbs, portraying them in 100 unique pieces "one hundred Chinese".
Recently the artist even began to make moulds of entire bodies in order to render his work "more realistic, more concrete" since "through the body one can see what a man thinks".