As a representative of Chinese contemporary art that uses ink as a material for creation, Peng Wei relies on her solid traditional skills, the expression means of Chinese ink painting and her unique private vision to connect ancient art resources with the present, dialogue with the heritage of world civilization, and seek a balance between the past and the present. In a unique way, she attempts to dissolve the binary concepts of East and West, tradition and contemporary, publicity and privacy.
Her brushstrokes, both east and west, the style is distinct, stone, robes, embroidered shoes, women's body, contemporary and traditional, permeated with ancient rhyme, revealing a trace of vitality. In her paintings, the image of an ancient woman is often used to show the plight and encounters of contemporary women, and from the deepest part, a wave of rebellion and defiance is revealed.
Peng Wei, a famous Contemporary Chinese artist, whose works have been collected by the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Art, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, the Hong Kong Museum of Art, the M+ Art Museum, the Princeton University Art Museum, the National Art Museum of China, the Swiss Sigg Collection, the French DSL Collection, the Princeton University Art Museum and other institutions.
Not long ago, Peng Wei brought her latest creation "We All Need Stories" series of paintings and animation works to the Shanghai Pearl Art Museum, where she met art lovers at the exhibition "Imaginary Encounters - Divine Comedy Dialogue "The Classic of Mountains and Seas". "We All Need Stories" continues Peng Wei's fascination with narrative. Drawing on the pattern of Cave 61 of the Dunhuang murals, this series of works is a new attempt to use multi-dimensional, multi-media narratives.
Peng Wei joked that she had been "fighting" with the story. In 2017, she created Seven Nights, which tells the different stories of seven different courtyard spaces happening at the same time in one night. Peng Wei juxtaposes the seven courtyard spaces, and the story unfolds in the juxtaposition deployment of the space. If the "Seven Nights" series is telling the story of parallel space, then "We All Need Stories" is an attempt to explore the narrative of vertical space and horizontal space superposition.
Perhaps it is difficult for you to imagine that in the past, Peng Wei did not think much of the storyline in the painting, and even still did not like to answer questions such as "what is the story of this work". However, now, for the "narrative" thing, she is almost in a state of obsession, especially in recent years, she has a different idea of "narrative", in the creation of more and more feel the importance of "narrative", so she named her new series of works "We all need stories", straight to the chest. "The name of the work comes from a quote made by Yuval Harari in A Brief History of Mankind: From Animals to God, 'Human beings need big stories, we all need big stories', and I want to use the work to tell things that are difficult to tell clearly, so as to reflect people's complex and changeable feelings." In Peng Wei's view, with the change of age and the migration of time, our views on the things around us and some yearning for the spiritual level are undergoing subtle changes.
In this series, whether it is animation or painting, when the artist weaves one painting after another, so that the story and painting become one, all kinds of entanglements, trust, dependence, love and hate, separation, birth and death... One by one, the things that make people feel lost, angry, sad, or happy seem to be the same throughout the ages, and they are so different. Peng Wei constructs the content of painting by telling different stories, borrowing real or imaginary things, and perhaps borrowing the fiction of art or literature to experience the unclear reality.
The work consists of layers of stories in several "tower" spaces, which in turn derive more forms. For example, small paintings and animations are like an extension of the story of the "tower" and the decomposition and disassembly of the tower after the building. Each floor of the tower has a story of progression or non-progression or parallel story.
Peng Wei has long been fascinated by the concept of "tower". Stupa, Tower of Babel, Tower of London, Ivory Tower, Gold Tower, Leifeng Tower... Each tower has an obvious symbolism, but to the artist it resembles a schema, a schema that is very effective for storytelling. The tower is the superposition of space, the superposition of stories, or the superposition of desires, the superposition of spiritual dimensions. In the space of the tower, which rises layer by layer, reality, dreams, myths and legends, Bible or Buddhist stories, people's feelings of life or imagination of death... It is like a fragment, reconstructed and stitched together.
Each "tower" space seems to be telling a different story, and the story narrated may be related to the artist himself, to many people, so it is not very clear, such as life, old age, illness and death, such as emotions, and at the same time it can be very specific, such as some people arguing, eating, delivering letters, or falling asleep, on fire... Seemingly small details ultimately make up a grand narrative.
Compared with the previous creative form, for Peng Wei, who is trying animation for the first time, the challenges are everywhere. Doing narrative painting is more like the director in the screenplay book, combining all the ideas and elements. "In the past, when you paint landscapes, when you paint stones, when you find a diagram, it's not so hard to structure these works, but when you want to narrate, put some unreasonable narrative on the same picture, just like the director and the screenwriter, you need a script. Because animation has temporality, and imagery is the art of temporality, you can present the process of painting, why this thing happened, and the result. When you want to organize large scenes and small scenes in one picture, it is not easy to connect the stories, logically and at the same time to impress people. When I saw those great murals in Dunhuang and Italy, China, I suddenly realized. These murals tell me that an artist with extremely high talent can turn irrational stories into rationality because of the picture. Painting and story become inseparable at this moment, allowing you to generate a strong sense of emotion and substitution. Peng Wei explained, "Doing animation is more like presenting the process of painting conception, and it is also like the extension of imagination after the painting is completed, and the transformation from the work of space to the work of time is both fun and difficult for me." ”
Peng Wei's father was the famous Chinese painter Peng Xiancheng, and since she recalled, she began to study painting with her father. What impressed her most was the back of her father who sat in front of the painting every night and painted. Talking about her father's greatest influence on herself, Peng Wei thought about it and replied: "It should be the attitude of doing one thing." In our family, painting is a part of life. His father is a painting idiot, his creation does not carry any utilitarianism, and even feels that holding an exhibition is also a distraction, simply painting can bring him the greatest happiness, becoming his happiest daily life day after day. ”
The Good Things Come in Pairs series
From a small painting of a few centimeters to a scroll of tens of meters, anything can become the carrier of Peng Wei's creation, and she can always draw it in her own way. This is her unique artistic language, from flat to three-dimensional, from painting stones and landscapes to painting clothes and shoes, to series such as "Distant Letters" and "Seven Nights", series after series, without stopping the creation. The narrative in her work is a process from hidden to explicit, with self-examining questions and reflections.
Seven Nights series
In 2007, she was immersed in the joy of making paper sculptures for a while, "during that time, she especially wanted to break out of the plane's 'confinement' and find something new and difficult to do." By chance, I picked up two old models and put them at home for more than half a year, and suddenly found that I could paste rice paper on it layer by layer, and after painting it, I took it off, and gradually formed a hard paper shell, which was so fun that I couldn't control it. Peng Wei named them "Shelling", which means that the golden cicada is out of the shell.
Paper-plastic series
Each phase of the work is significant to her, and to this day, she still retains one of her earliest works, "This is the beginning of my creation, just like we will keep pictures of our own infancy." I keep a few pieces for each series, because these works condense my time, and when they come together, they piece together the trajectory of my life. ”
The exhibition site of "New Compilation of Stories"
The dialogue between the past and the present has always run through the main line of Peng Wei's creation. At the beginning of 2017, Peng Wei accidentally saw a Ming Dynasty Lu Kun's "Boudoir", a collection of historical stories about female moral models, the characters in the book are completely different from the maids she usually sees in ancient paintings, those illustrated pictures shocked her, anger, sad emotions filled the picture, "I thought to myself, this may be a real social situation, presenting a big historical background, these things may be hidden behind the art history, especially interesting." Peng Wei shared. Thus, the "New Compilation of Stories" was born. In the 50-meter-long "New Compilation of Stories", she uses a paintbrush to strip these women from the ancient context, enlarge them, and use the freehand method of black and white ink to present the unknown side of ancient women's lives. They stood alone on white paper, but behind each of them was a shocking story.
There are often people who deliberately emphasize the identity of "female artist", but Peng Wei will not be bound by this label, nor will she deliberately "speak" for the form of art, she only does what she is really interested in, only those creations that are felt by the changes in life. "All forms depend on the content and theme to be expressed, in fact, I never felt that I was making a device, or a work, but sometimes I had to speak in this way." Starting from herself, starting from life experience, and doing as she pleases, this is what she has been insisting on.
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