modernization. With his graffiti, Zhang Dali turned into a public intellectual renown in China and all over the world. " Urban expansion and its ambiguous spread fill us with excitement, unease and disquiet. Each and every corner of the city is a chaotic mess. Mounds of garbage are piling up and people eat, shit and sleep amongst the refuse. Children look for toys in the debris. River water runs ink black and stinks like hell, while plastic bags hang from tree branches and play catch on the grass, nodding and waving in the breeze like severed heads and hands. Men in pressing business suits enter the main gates of fancy hotels, while rivers of filth run from the hotels’ rear. " Zhang Dali, Demolition – Continuing Dialogue, February 1998 in Zhang Dali, Wuhan United Art Museum 2015 AK-47 AK-47 is the name of an automatic rifle designed by Michail Kalashnikov, from whose name comes the abbreviation of AK (Avtomat Kalashnikova) and was produced for the first time in the Soviet Union in 1947. All over the world, the name AK-47 has become a symbol of wars, insurrections and gang criminality. Zhang Dali started to use this tag during the nineties in his graffiti as a synonym of the violence permeating the fast urbanization process. From the year 2000, he started a series of portraits emerging from the chromatic contrast of "AK-47"s' shades. The paintings are acrylic on vinyl, a material widely used for advertisement boards, a feature becoming an integral part of the Beijing’s urban landscape in those years. The faces are copied from portrait photos Zhang Dali found in a pile of abandoned photo studio archives, sold in bulk at the flea market. The acronym is not painted on the faces, but it is used to portray the faces themselves: violence is not “on” people, it is the very material with which people are made of, not a washable coating, but integral part and connecting tissue of their existence. Slogan This is a series of portraits emerging from the repetition and color shade contrast of Chinese characters, similar to the "AK-47", but now belonging to the slogans. In the year preceding the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the capital was invaded by gigantic banners and boards of government propaganda slogans. Even though this feature has always been a part of Chinese urban and rural landscapes, so much so to become