The Tina Keng Gallery (Taipei) presents Letters from a Distance, a solo exhibition of the Beijing-based artist Peng Wei. More than 20 of Peng’s paintings and installations from Letters from a Distance show Peng Wei’s deft combination of the classic aesthetics of Chinese portraiture and of contemporary living conditions. She maintains the essence of traditional Chinese water and ink paintings, transforming them from two-dimensional pieces into multidimensional-dimensional paper sculptures.
Peng not only preserves traditional Chinese shan-shui in her works, but through her installation art also introduces the cultural and historical background carried by scrolls and albums. Her works concern the past of art, including the wisdom, memories, sorrows and sense of the real found in earlier artworks. With her traditional methods, she departs from convention, yet brings traditional texts and contemporary concepts together on paper. Though she alters them she does not transform traditions, and instead, her work achieves a delicate balance between art’s past and present.
The title Letters from a Distance stems from Peng’s process, in which she carefully draws each detail of her works, including patterns of brocades with complex structures, and transcribes letters, diaries, or poems by Western authors onto her works. She then ties her scrolls with different ribbons and puts them in customized wooden boxes. To a certain extent, in such a form, she is sending letters to someone she never has the chance to meet and also gives viewers an approach to explore her works through the texts she reads.
Peng Wei was born in Chengdu, China, and currently lives in Beijing. She graduated from Nankai University with a master’s degree in philosophy. She has held several solo exhibitions in Taipei, Hong Kong, and China since 2003, including: Taking off the Shell (He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen, China, 2011), Body & Robe—Peng Wei’s Solo Exhibition (Tina Keng Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan, 2010), Paper Skin (Artside Gallery, Beijing, China, 2009), and Woven Clouds—Peng Wei’s Exhibition (Plum Blossoms Gallery, Hong Kong, China, 2007). She has also participated in many international group exhibitions and art fairs, including: Beijing International Art Biennale (2003, 2005), The 10th Asian International Art Exhibition (Fukuoka Asia Art Museum, Yokohama, Japan, 2004), Contemporary Ink Paintings (Berlin National Museum, Dresden National Art Collection Museum, Germany, 2008), Europalia International Arts Festival-Attitudes-Female Art in China (The European Centre of Contemporary Art, Brussels, Belgium, 2009), Exhibition of Landscapes in Chinese Contemporary Art (Museum of Art Lucerne, Switzerland, 2011), Art Stage Singapore (2012), Breakthrough: Work by Contemporary Chinese Women Artists (Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Maine, US, 2013), and Art Beijing (2010, 2013).
-Tina Keng Gallery
Image: © Peng Wei
