Peng Wei 彭薇
Academic History and Exhibitions
Peng Wei was born in Chengdu, China in 1974, into a family of painters. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Chinese Painting, Oriental Cultural Art from Nankai University (1997), followed by a Master’s degree in Philosophy from the same institution (2000). From 2000 to 2006, she served as editor of ART Magazine in Beijing. She is currently a senior member at the Beijing Fine Art Academy and member of the China Fine Arts Association.
Her dexterous, patient wielding of the ink brush and her holistic craftsmanship have won huge acclaim and a devoted collector base. Her treatment of the riddle of time itself lies at the heart of her success: “I attempt to separate myself from tradition using the most traditional means possible.” She surprises, delights and fascinates in equal measure.
Peng Wei has exhibited in many major group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (2017), Cha-Na—Contemporary Ink Show, Art Basel Hong Kong, Galerie Ora-Ora, Two Generations: Ink Art by Peng Xiancheng & Peng Wei, Sotheby’s Hong Kong Gallery, START Art Fair in London and Real Life Stories: the Chinese Contemporary Art Exhibition at The Bergen Art Museum in Norway. Other group exhibitions since 2003 took place in cities as diverse as Berlin, Bern, Copenhagen, Guangzhou, Suzhou and Yokahama.
Prior to Volta13, other solo exhibitions included: I thought of You, Suzhou Museum, Contemporary Art Gallery in 2016, Coming Full Circle: Peng Wei Solo Exhibition at National Museum of History in Taipei (2015), Letters from a Distance atArt Basel Hong Kong, Galerie Ora-Ora in 2014. Solo exhibitions in Beijing include: Peng Wei's Painting Installation Exhibition, Opposite House, Beijing, China and Paper Skin, Artside Gallery, Beijing, China, both in 2009.
Her works have been collected by the National Art Museum of China, the Hong Kong Museum of Art, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Guangdong Art Museum, the He Xiangning Art Museum, the M+ Museum, the Uli Sigg Collection, the DSL Collection and many more.
Nothing but the Now
Peng Wei embraces past and present as a single entity. Reaching across the ages, as if only the Now exists, Peng Wei is able to combine classical Chinese motifs with unexpected contexts and historical situations, producing an output which is somehow ancient and timeless.
Peng Wei’s early art education that was dominated by the western tradition. Her father, also a painter, most admired the impressionist school. As she noted in a 2016 conversation with Uli Sigg: “…When I went to university and started to see classical Chinese painting, it was strange, fresh and curious. I discovered that old Chinese painting was newer and more worthy than post 1949 Chinese painting, because it was more accessible. The view of history expressed by ancient painting has no agenda or doctrine. It makes history living, present and one with me.”
Commenting on her relationship with the artists of ancient times, Peng Wei’s words are enigmatic: “From the Chinese perspective, “the ancients” and “I” are two dots on the same timeline. Whether they meet or not is what matters.” The sentence underlines the impression she gives that time, as we narrowly define it, may be an illusion, and that communion with the past is possible in a more real, vital way than the current stage of human advancement may imagine.
This understanding of time may be a uniquely Chinese perspective. When challenged on whether she would describe her works as contemporary, she had this to say: “I do not want to prove my contemporaneity, because the concept of “contemporary art” came from the west. However, I do want to prove that Chinese ink paintings are games with established rules. In particular, I want to show how the Chinese concepts of time, the past and the present are different from those of the west.”
Unusually, Peng Wei uses the analogy of a wall. Unusual because she is not describing breaking walls down, but that the artist seeks to build a wall. The artist creates, builds, and next generations either add to that wall or tear it down. Dealing with the wall, building it, bumping against it, climbing over it or tunnelling through it, is Peng Wei’s life work. “There is a high wall between the contemporary and the traditional, as between the east and the west…. Some people can naturally pass through this wall, but some run into it until they are bruised and bloody.”
As Peng Wei says of her own works, “I admire all artists who can skillfully and faithfully fuse the influence of thought and reality. I admire artists who listen attentively to themselves… Like Susan Sontag said, “Be serious. Never be cynical. But this doesn’t preclude being funny.”
It may ultimately be fruitless to classify Peng Wei, place her on a timeline, or to investigate her works with dry, historical or academic phraseology – her works may be intellectually and technically rigorous, but they are grounded in humour, wry wit and personal vivacity which, to some extent, defies scholastic debate.
The Lost Stones
One of the classical subjects she first employed were the scholars rocks, examples of which were acquired by leading Swiss collector, Uli Sigg. As the artist notes, “The Lost Stones was truly the beginning of my artistic path… Stones, a traditional Chinese motif of countless artists, when rendered by my paintbrush, become something very personal, very present.”
In discussion with Peng Wei about her Lost Stones output, Sigg remarked: “Your work has a certain position… as an enlargement or enrichment of my collection… your paintings are beautiful and full of personality.”
Scrolls, Landscapes and Letters from a Distance
Peng Wei’s depictions of classical Chinese landscapes in scroll form re-ignites the language of shan shui, in constructions staying true to the flow of energy, use of moving perspective, and architectural motifs from the past.
They are often paired with letters from composers, writers and thinkers from the west. Sometimes these juxtapositions serve to accentuate the differences between the decorous behavioral values of the Confucian coda and the reckless effusiveness of the westerners. Private, revealing dialogues of renowned historical figures are laid bare before the viewer: ardent letters from Lord Byron to Countess Teresa Guiccioli, pure longings from La Porte Étroite by André Gide or unrequited passions from Maria Tsvetaeva to Rainer Maria Rilke, have all been recreated in lavish scroll form. Peng Wei’s calligraphic transcripts and detailed illustrations pair Chinese themes, images or philosophical contexts with the text to occasionally amusing, insightful or unsettling effect.
Just as Gide’s La Porte Étroite may be considered a philosophical counterpoint to his Les Nourritures Terrestres, so too does Peng Wei juxtapose individuals of different viewpoints, perspectives and messages. Each correspondent, like birds of ancient legend, has flown far and wide in spirit and reputation if not in deed, and Peng Wei’s work gleefully continues this adventurous journey that each is making.
Humour is one of the emotions Peng Wei joyously evokes, enjoying the revelation of unsuspected frailties in the writer, such as Ludwig van Beethoven’s writing to a friend angrily demanding the return of a spoon, or Mozart’s exhorting his wife to be less familiar with his friends.
The creation doesn’t end with words and chosen image, however. In her Letters from a Distance collection, Peng Wei creates entire, independent,
holistic scrolls of landscape, calligraphy and design, which, when rolled up, present their decorative patterns externally, paintstakingly architected by the artist. Demonstrating a conscious solidarity with the craftsmen of previous generations, she creates the entirety of the object, from scroll to mountings, inscription and the box.
Titans of thought from Dostoevsky and Kafka to Tschaikovsky and Shostakovich are freely exposed to posthumous biographical investigation in a riotous autopsy of colour and craftsmanship. Subtle, gentle, yet wickedly subversive, these works are sources of simultaneously intellectual, emotional and visual splendour for the visitor. Somehow, both time-specific and eternal, mixing classical motifs, contemporary candour, western thoughts and Chinese re-interpretations, these works are among Peng Wei’s most sought-after.
Patient decoding of the text draws the viewer closer and intensifies the closed-off, confessional atmosphere of the letter experience. Misunderstandings, misreadings are part of life now as then. As Peng Wei remarked in a 2015 interview with Rudy Tseng of Taipei’s National Museum of History: “I intentionally made the densely written text difficult to read. Misplaced or aligned, truth or falsehood – it is a game of text.”
The Nakedness of Clothing
The depiction of clothing has been a thread running through Peng Wei’s work, beginning with a series of individual shoes, separated from their twin and from the owner. They seem to underscore the lonely futility of existence, and yet the colourful details point to the tenacious assertiveness of life itself.
As Xu Lei wrote of Peng Wei’s embroidered shoes: “The shoes in Peng Wei’s painting embody a certain theatrical expression, unpredictable and dazzling…”
The shoes were to be re-born in Peng Wei’s Good Things Come in Pairs series from 2011, in which the soles of shoes are decorated with romantic, sensual imagery of the classical past. Here the shoes, bereft of feet, become enchanting treasure boxes, and a lens into the private couplings of yesterday. A nod to the erotic associations of the feet in Chinese history, and a subtle implication that each of us is carrying secrets just out of reach of those around us.
Peng Wei illuminates clothing, re-interpreting clothes as naked objects, devoid of human association and yet resolutely possessed of intrinsic and personal life force. From shoes, she developed her theme into robes – arms outspread as an embrace. Given the historical nature and significance of these vestments, Peng Wei’s commentary of the past may be here called to mind: “it isn’t we who embrace tradition, but rather tradition itself is an eternally open embrace.”
The nakedness of the clothing, the vulnerability of an object stripped of its partner and function, brought Peng Wei closer into the intimate realm of the human body and skin, hinted at by Feng Boyi, when he wrote of her robes: “Rather than saying Peng Wei is painting clothing, perhaps it would be more apt to say that she is “painting skin.”
It was a short mental leap from here to the Taking off the Shell series: extending the readymade ideas of Marcel Duchamp into the human arena. Human bodies, plastic mannequins with overtones of Graeco-Roman sculpture, become the backdrop for art, swaddled in xuan paper and illustrated with delicate paintings of bird and flower, hunting and classical architecture.
In a further development, painting on traditional Song dynasty Chinese tuan shan (moon-shaped fans) allowed Peng Wei to playfully undermine expectations of what it means to be Chinese and an artist, and which of our history is universal or uniquely Chinese. In her fan paintings, Peng Wei combined east and west through depicting western faces, clothing and scenes from Europe of the middle ages. Demonstrating her characteristically mischievous humour which shines through her work, she feigned surprise when one commentator suggested that these works no long seemed Chinese: “If we paint western faces, do the paintings become western?”
The Meaning of it All
A candid, beautiful message is at the heart of Peng Wei’s work, revealed when she spoke about her own artistic journey: “I always strive to create a more perfect work. We need perfection, but the meaning of life lies not in perfection, but in love.”
In this context, her artwork, which so often harnesses the traditions of painting or the personal stories of others, may be viewed as a testament to humanity and its power to persist, persevere and re-generate. It seeks not to judge, but to point out the beauty of life through landscape, history and (on occasion) a wry smile at our own follies.
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Anticipation
24 Jan - 9 Mar 2019Galerie Ora-Ora is delighted to kick start the year of 2019 with Anticipation, a dynamic group exhibition that shares the passion of artists who explore, express or investigate the identity...Read more -
Screaming Books
1 - 17 Mar 2018Galerie Ora-Ora’s opening show asserts the universality of art, and its role as a standard bearer for unbarriered, unfettered expression and understanding. Where words belong to language silos, imbued with...Read more -
Volta13
12 - 17 Jun 2017Galerie Ora-Ora at VOLTA 13, Basel, Switzerland will present epistolary anecdotes from the lives of history's greatest musicians, illustrated by Peng Wei. Cocooned in a darkened space, visitors will be...Read more -
INK ASIA 2016
15 - 18 Dec 2016Galerie Ora-Ora invites the visitor on a journey of celebration into the rich imaginations of our pioneering contemporary ink artists. Artists committed to actualizing their most modern, vivid dreams through...Read more -
Art Basel Hong Kong 2016
Cha-Na 22 - 26 Mar 2016Cha-Na is the study of the instance, its nature, importance, reflections, iterations and incarnations. Philosophers believe the instance is sacred and has fundamental importance to understanding the existence of the...Read more -
Cha-Na
21 Mar - 23 Apr 2016For this year’s Art Gallery Night, Ora-Ora will present “Cha-Na” as a continuation of our exhibition at Art Basel Hong Kong 2016. Cha-Na is the study of the instance, its...Read more -
Winter Sunrise - A Joint Sculpture Exhibition
6 - 23 Nov 2015Each November brings Hong Kong Art Gallery Week, a week-long Arts Festival of Talks, Tours, Studio Visits, circling Art Buses touring the different art districts, Art Lates as well as...Read more -
Fine Art Asia 2015
Chubby Comedy - Xu Hongfei 4 - 7 Oct 2015With fluid, vivid poses and buxom female bodies, world renowned sculptor Xu Hongfei’s “Chubby Women” sculptures convey a sense of exquisiteness, representing the beauty of freedom and revealing the powerful...Read more -
Art15 London
21 - 23 May 2015Ora-Ora participated at Art15 London from 21-23 May and the show was well received by both local and international audiences. We were delighted to stage the works of renowned Chinese...Read more -
START Art Fair
25 - 29 Jun 2014London's newest art fair, START drew to a successful close at the Saatchi Gallery on 29th June 2014. The fair was particularly international in scope: 46 galleries came from 21...Read more -
Devotion to Ink Contemporary Ink Show
17 - 19 May 2014With over one thousand years of history, ink art has evolved from traditional ink to create a contemporary aesthetic standard and visual experience. In harmony with Art Basel Hong Kong,...Read more -
Art Basel Hong Kong 2014
Letters From a Distance - Peng Wei 14 - 18 May 2014Recognizing Art Basel’s leadership in contemporary art, Ora-Ora believes this is an important opportunity to help connect international collectors and enthusiasts with the fundamental elements of ink, a medium that...Read more
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(Hong Kong Arts Month) The most concentrated art space in Central
March 16, 2018香港01 Once galleries were blooming in the city of Hong Kong, yet, normally with locations rather far away from the crowd. Ever since the inauguration...Read more -
Founder of Galerie Ora-Ora, Henrietta Tsui-Leung: It’s necessary to create a blooming industry for arts; and it’s a pleasure to compete with powerful rivals
March 16, 2018Artron Galerie Ora-Ora is proud to celebrate the opening of their new space in the H Queen’s building in March, where its new art space...Read more -
“Screaming Books”: Galerie Ora-Ora opens new space at H Queen’s, Hong Kong – in conversation with Henrietta Tsui-Leung
March 14, 2018Art Radar Founded by Henrietta Tsui-Leung ten years ago in Hong Kong, Galerie Ora-Ora is a research-based contemporary art gallery specialising in sculpture and works...Read more -
Screaming Books
March 1, 2018TimeOut Galerie Ora-Ora’s inaugural exhibition explores the relationship between art and literature, featuring works including the King of Kowloon. To celebrate the move to their...Read more -
A purpose-built art building bringing the galleries together
March 1, 2018Sing Tao Daily Entering “Hong Kong Arts Month” with the upcoming significant exhibitions and events, lovers and readers for culture and arts have already filled...Read more -
"Screaming Books" – Halley Cheng, Hung Keung, Peng Jian and 5 Additional Artists
March 1, 2018DODOOBA “Screaming Books” inaugurates Galerie Ora-Ora’s new space in the H Queen’s building. This literature-themed group exhibition features eight contemporary Chinese and Hong Kong artists—Halley...Read more -
Galerie Ora-Ora latest show "Screaming Books" at H Queen's
March 1, 2018Artron News Galerie Ora-Ora is proud to celebrate the opening of the new space in the H Queen’s building with an inaugural exhibition that explores...Read more -
Local Talent: 7 Must-See Exhibitions At Hong Kong's Homegrown Galleries
February 20, 2018Hong Kong Tatler There’s more to Hong Kong’s art scene than the celebrated shows at big international galleries. Here’s our pick of upcoming exhibitions at...Read more -
‘Screaming Books’ at Ora-Ora, Hong Kong
February 8, 2018Blouin ArtInfo Galerie Ora-Ora is hosting an exhibition titled “Screaming Books” at its Hong Kong venue. Galerie Ora-Ora’s exhibition “Screaming Books” asserts the universality of...Read more -
Volta Basel 2017 - The Art Fair for New International Positions
June 16, 2017VOLTA Basel aims at providing a platform for international galleries. Due to the eclectic and dynamic presentations with a strong focus on solo shows, it...Read more -
Smaller and Scrappier, VOLTA 13 Promises to Be One of the Best Fairs This Season
June 14, 2017artnet.com Dealers are gearing up for the “lucky” 13th edition of VOLTA, Art Basel’s globally conscious satellite fair that serves as a platform for emerging...Read more -
Art Radar Brings You 6 Must-See Gallery Booths at VOLTA Art Fair in Basel.
June 14, 2017Art Radar Launched on 12 June 2017, VOLTA 13 in Basel presents 70 galleries from 43 cities around the world, with a focus on solo...Read more -
Rulers and stereotypes: A first stroll through the Volta 13
June 12, 2017Barfi.ch We conclude our tour with the installation 'Migrations of Memory' of the Chinese artist Peng Wei at the booth of Galerie Ora-Ora. While the...Read more -
The 20 Best Booths at Art Basel in Hong Kong
March 22, 2016Artsy After a stint in the fair's Insights section last year, Ora-Ora graduates to Galleries with a curated exhibition, 'Cha-Na.' Addressing ideas around instantaneousness and...Read more -
Art Big Bang: March
March 11, 2016Hong Kong 01 More than 3 billion years ago, the universe is but a micro singular dot of measureless weight. There is no starry sky,...Read more -
Art Interview: Peng Wei and Henrietta Tsui
June 1, 2014Baccarat Hong Kong Among the mayhem that was Art Basel in Hong Kong 2014 was a petite and demure Chinese artist called Peng Wei, whose...Read more -
“Letter from a Distance” Peng Wei Solo Exhibition at Art Basel Hong Kong
May 30, 2014KUART Galerie Ora-Ora will be presenting Letter from a Distance - Peng Wei Solo Exhibition at this year's Art Basel Hong Kong, from 14 to...Read more