Né en 1970 à Fenyang, dans la Province de Shanxi, au nord de la Chine.

A l'âge de 18 ans, Jia Zhang Ke entre à l'Ecole des Beaux Arts de Taiyuan (Province de Shanxi) pour y étudier la peinture. Il développe un intérêt pour la fiction et écrit en 1991 son premier roman The Sun Hung On The Crotch.
En 1993, il est admis à l'Académie du Film de Pékin et en 1995, il fonde le "Youth Expérimental Film Group", première structure de production indépendante en Chine, avec laquelle il réalise ses deux premiers films tournés en vidéo Xiao Shan Going Home et Du Du. Il obtient son diplôme de l'Académie du Film en 1997, année où il réalise son premier long métrage Xiao Wu artisan pickpocket.


Filmographie

> 2006, Dong - KA (Chine)
Documentary project that put Jia Zhang-ke on the trail of his film Still Life, which won a Golden Lion. Portrait of the leading Chinese painter Liu Xiaodong, working upstream of the Three Gorges Dam in Sichuan and in Bangkok.


> 2006, Still Life - Sanxia haoren (Hong Kong, Chine)
Surprising winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. In one of the towns that will disappear under water through the rising waters of the gigantic Three Gorges Dam, a man is looking for the woman he deserted years ago and the woman is looking for her missing husband. Alongside a brilliant exercise in filming with high-definition, an emotional and social masterpiece. See also Dong.


> 2004, The World - Shi jie (Chine, Japon, France), long métrage, couleur, 35mn
Attractive, intelligent portrait of a series of young inhabitants of Beijing, against the magnificent decor of a theme park with replicas of world famous buildings. Beautifully designed with short animations in manga style, electronic beats, beautiful tourist glitter shows and revealing dressing room scenes.


> 2002, Unknown Pleasures - Ren xiao yao - Plaisirs Inconnus (Chine, Japon), long métrage, couleur, 35mm
Contemporary street-corner kids in China make good use of their time, because they want to die young. Before then, Xiao Ji first wants to bed a model; Bin Bin is mainly interested in karaoke. The third film by the greatest talent of the Chinese cinema.


> 2001, Digital Short Films (In Public, par Jia Zhang-Ke / Digitopia, par John Akomfrah / A Conversation with God, par Tsai Ming-liang) 2002 3x30 min (Corée du Sud)
Dans ces trois films de 30 minutes chacun, trois réalisateurs de renommée internationale - à l'appel du festival coréen de cinéma, Jeonju Film Festival, explorent les possibilités de la vidéo numérique. Deux portraits vivants urbains et une histoire sur l'amour numérique, très différents les uns des autres.

The Korean Jeonju Film Festival commissioned three film-makers to make a film and only placed two restrictions on them: the length should be no more than thirty minutes and they had to film with a digital videocamera. Despite the very different results, all three films include moments in which the future of digital film becomes tangible. Digitopia by John Akomfrah is about a man who is torn back and forth between the digital and analogue world. He is desperately seeking love and tries to turn his digital relationship into a real relationship. The subject of his affections, a prostitute, is however less than enthusiastic.
For In Public, Jia spent 45 days filming public places in the former mining town of Datung. The influence of capitalism on the town is clear: an old bus is now a restaurant, a railway station has suddenly been turned into a disco. Datung has become a town without a function, but despite the depression, the inhabitants remain optimistic.
A Conversation with God is the most elusive of the three. Here Tsai Ming-liang searches for God, in a collage of lively images from the big city. We see a medium in trance, a river bank strewn with dead fish and a striptease. An exciting contemporary document.

> 2000, Zhan Tai - Platform (Hong Kong, China, Japan, France), long métrage, couleur, 35mm
The political and social upheavals in the 1980s, as a consequence of Deng Xiao-ping's'open-door policy', have their effect on the members of a theatre group in a small village in the Chinese countryside.


> 1997, Xiao Wu, artisan pickpocket (Chine, Hong Kong), long métrage, couleur, 16mm
'No budget' feature starts as an exercise in raw social realism, but slowly develops into something more special. Xiao Wu is a scummy-yet-likeable petty thief whose loser's armour is stripped off layer by layer.

> 1996, Du Du, long métrage, couleur, vidéo

> 1995, Xiao Shan Going Home, long métrage, couleur, vidéo
Premier Prix au Hong Kong Independent Short Film & Video Festival