Chair was made in 2006, at the heart of the period when Zhang Enli first established the body of work for which he is now best known internationally: large scale paintings of ordinary objects rendered in thin, washy acrylic against the warm ground of the unprimed or lightly primed canvas. The object here is a common plastic folding chair, the kind found in restaurants, temporary offices, and community halls across Shanghai. The Chinese characters in the lower left corner are the manufacturer's mark, which position it precisely within its world. Zhang tips and angles the chair slightly, so that its geometry becomes almost abstract, the white outline of the frame describing a set of interlocking forms that push against the edges of the picture. His brushwork is loose and confident, rooted in the traditions of Chinese ink painting but always underpinned by a pencil drawn structural grid. The painting belongs to the same year as his inclusion in Villa Manin's Infinite Painting and Global Realism, curated by Francesco Bonami, and predates by eight years his major institutional recognition in Europe.