Peng Wei's “Private Paintings”

By Feng Boyi



 
Peng Wei is not one of those artists who engages in an immediate and straightforward sense of reality.  She isn’t interested in participating in the popular “reality craze” of the avant-garde.  Rather, she seeks a kind of purity of spirit within the warmth and peacefulness of a traditional “boudoir,” or perhaps it’s an interest in the ivory tower.    Her art doesn't accept the restrictions of an external social reality.  Instead, it reaps the imagination of an individual.  Her works are free of traces of the present discourse.  They derive, instead, from blood ties to traditional Chinese literati painting and reflections on the language and form of art itself.  Thus, in the carelessness of the everyday, she's able to discover expressions directly related to femininity within the dress, personal adornment, and scenery of the ordinary; completely outside of the grand narrative discourse.  Her works exhibit refinement, elegance, and a disclosure of her feelings.  Compared with works of avant-garde art that publicize “spurting blood,” they lack any sort of darkness and confusion, and instead appear watery and gentle.  She is seeing another side of intellectual integrity in history, time, and reality, and wants no more than to follow this path.
 
Peng Wei's process for producing art adopts an attitude of “looking back.”  By reaching into forms of dress within traditional culture, she meditates on the past and penetrates the elapsed time and space of a vanished life.  On many different levels, she harbors a kind of clothing “fetish.”  Robes and shoes from the Song, Ming, and Qing are enduring subjects in her paintings.  Clothing is a second layer of skin on our bodies, serving as a barrier between our private space and the public sphere.  Rather than saying Peng Wei is painting clothing, it would perhaps be more apt to say she's “painting skin.”  How much does dress bear the weight of ideology?  It symbolizes an immediate reflection on how the vicissitudes of life affect us.  Peng Wei clusters and adds color onto the clothes that are closest to the body, including in her current work in progress “underclothing” which depicts ready-made objects.  Clothing forms a metaphorical manifestation of her experiences, memories, and interests.  Onto the life-likeness of the clothing, she applies a dimly discernible illusoriness.  There is no doubt that everything is “past” (a pair of contemporary shoes is also painted as an antique), yet it nevertheless shares the property of natural things that have a hypothetical history.  Different kinds of clothing are outlined and dyed, enveloping and opening up the critical points of her ink painting.  She doesn't simply and directly represent the complexities of reality, but that is perhaps the success of her art.  Being far off from reality allows her art to maintain the microscopic details of her emotions, making apparent the substance and mystery of the ink painting itself.  When we view her works, we often encounter these nodes of minutiae.  From her individual experiences, she tailors fragments of historical clothing to express her memories and loves.  Even though there is no concrete figural imagery, there seems to be a shadow outlined on the silk to echo and construct an “alienation effect.”  Within the sentimental yearning for the past, there is a search for the longing and freedom found in dreams, from which emerges a style that is at once sad and beautiful, feminine and gentle.  On this point, she is also genuinely real: within the conditions of a subjective idea, she authentically expresses an inner world—a kind of abstract reality refracted from the inner self—to the point that being enamored with this kind of vocabulary and style replaces interest in the things that are actually depicted in her paintings.  She builds an exquisite illusion that she pursues with single-hearted devotion.  Robes or shoes, even underclothing, possess infinite varieties of types, styles, and colors, which can be mixed together in a multitude of ways.  Besides being implicated in body politics or serving as symbols and declarations of identity, they are also capable of achieving a kind of state of mind.  They add value to emotion, and in a clamorous and chaotic world, they can be enriched with a dispassionate self-expression.
 
It’s not difficult to discuss these feelings and perceptions.  The real question is how did interest in this kind of Jiangnan scholarly tradition come to fall onto young Peng Wei, so much so that it constitutes an intrinsic part of her delicate artistic vocabulary.  This is especially interesting given the conditions of globalization and the internet boom.  Perhaps from the viewpoint of Chinese tradition and aesthetics, the depiction of dress symbolically and metaphorically carries and extends traditional Chinese literati consciousness.  Using self-proclaimed femininity to narrate literati ideals and the seclusion from reality, Peng Wei is fated to naturally foster female sensitivity and a refined aesthetic touch.  As “compensation” for the rashness of reality, her aesthetic interests have developed to form an aestheticism patterned like parallel couplets in the literary work Li Ci.  A microcosm of Peng Wei's self is embodied in her images of seasonal dress.  She doesn’t avoid expressing interest in perceptions of surreal scenes from life, and her painstaking depictions of an old type of lifestyle convey a kind of faint and sad gentleness.  In one stroke of poetic charm, she evokes the ambience of the courtyard, boudoir, landscape, flora, lake rocks…all silently penetrating into a leisurely and comfortable, tired and sleepy, luxurious and at times decadent, spirit.  This recalls sentimental literati topics deduced through Chinese culture.  Even though at present the soft and gentle countryside surrounding the Qinhuai River of the Jiangnan region has already been lost to us, there is no need to compare the old and new conventions of literati lifestyle and attitude.  Peng Wei’s art ultimately points to traversing the boundary: crossing over from that which is sealed off in order to attain freedom.  It is as if one can see in her work a continuation of early literati aesthetic interest in women as well as women’s views of themselves.
 
Properties of contemporary society have already become divided between cultural aestheticism and material comforts.  Aesthetic creation has therefore also become a self-portrayal and narcissism of the literati spirit.  But, its essence is still a current version of a classical literati existence, a way of taking oneself as one's target and consuming that spirit.  Of course, these are only my views of Peng Wei's paintings; these feelings and conjectures about her work are not necessarily identical to her own creative consciousness.  Nonetheless, the subjective plan in creating the work and its subsequent effects are always at a distance, especially when a work ultimately becomes a cultural product, is separated from its author, and is evaluated by its social effects.  As the art historian Erwin Panofsky says, the interpretation of art inevitably exceeds what the author herself visualizes.  The subjects of dress, landscape, utensils—and the theme of escaping reality—still exist in Peng Wei's reflections on realistic life experiences even though she doesn't directly mention the value and function of seeking and collecting old dreams in contemporary culture.
 
History has always been difficult to restore.  Time elapses and those authentic scenes are buried in the dust of the past.  Nowadays, the scenes that live in elderly people's memories are merely archeological fragments filtered through individual experiences.  They are left over in various texts, left wide open for infinite possibilities and space for deciphering.  History has already irreversibly evolved into a cluster of beautiful and charming dream-like illusions to be yearned over.  Peng Wei uses brushstrokes to touch the exquisite textured grain of history, and viewers pause in front of her paintings to make these connections.