Peng Wei’s Paintings 
 
Jiang Fangzhou
 


 
There’s nothing new under the sun, so people give new things special power. As Brecht said, “Don’t start from the good old things but the bad new ones.” After all, beginning to create from the bad new things is easy. When confronted with a loophole-riddled mass culture and the crudeness of our times, sensitive and intelligent souls will easily find the cracks, dive down deep into them, and find a place for themselves. In hindsight, Duchamp and Dadaism were nothing more than another modern form of negligence, but their rise was a symbol of changing times.
 Good old things inspire awe. They first make your heart pound, then they disappoint you. Existing beauty has already been depicted, and it seems that almost all possible beauty has already been exhausted.

 Even so, Peng Wei chose a difficult path: beginning with good old things.

 Her painting career started with paintings of scholar stones. Since the Western and Eastern Jin dynasties, these decorative stones have been the objects of feverish collection and appreciation on the part of the literati classes. Countless painters have painted scholar stones; they are important aesthetic symbols in traditional culture and key motifs in Chinese culture.

It is a hard and thankless job to paint things that countless people have painted before you, but Peng Wei paints stones in a unique way. In contrast to traditional Chinese paintings and post-Renaissance humanism, her flowing yet abrupt paintings of scholar’s stones seem to be duplicates, but they are extremely varied. Stones do not age and do not die; they endure Peng’s parodies and distortions.

 I understand Peng Wei’s paintings of stones. They’re like Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs of water and atmosphere; he focuses on water and atmosphere because these are the things that have changed the least in human history. When we see Sugimoto’s pictures, there is no difference between the images refracting into our pupils and what the ancients saw. Peng Wei’s paintings of the Memorial Stone in Beihai Park are generally underpinned by the same logic. Stones are the bequest of ancient times. When appreciating the stones, we temporarily coexist with the ancients. Time is no longer a linear arrow headed in one direction; it’s an interlocking, cyclical, and even three-dimensional structure.

  Peng Wei says that, in the last decade, whenever she felt confused or fed up with her current phase of work, she would return to the stones and paint for a long time. When she paints stones, she also sees Borges’ two rivers facing one another. Borges once wrote that we have two ways of seeing the river of time. One river flows from the past toward us and into the future. The other river comes straight at us from the future, passing us and disappearing into the past. In art, people temporarily triumph over time and obtain a small amount of immortality.

When she paints stones, Peng Wei borrows a magic wand that confounds time. In her later paintings, she continually entwines dislocated times, and the ultimate embodiments of this are the details in Letters from a Distance.

 Her paintings are Chinese landscape paintings in the ancient forms of scrolls and album leaves. Every painting comes complete with a box. Fabric was not used in the mounting of the scrolls; she has painted the textures of textiles. At first glance, they could be confused with antique paintings, but closer observation reveals that she has employed Persian miniature techniques.

Various letters were painted next to these images. These letters were written by Western artists, musicians, and philosophers. Some of the titles of the works come from Bob Dylan lyrics, some come from film titles, and some she simply made up. These are not the same old tricks of ancient painting.

A painting called The Ends of the Earth incorporates a letter from Paul Gauguin. In the letter, he announces that he is going to live in seclusion on an island in the South Pacific to devote himself to pure art and nature.

 In the painting, a man and a woman snuggle in a boat, with a crewman rowing and rolling waves in the background. They are lucky to be escaping death, but the man and woman seem to be stealing a moment of innocent love. They wear expressions of quiet delight, which form a charming contrast to Gauguin’s exaggerated and abstract love of art.
This is what I like about Peng Wei’s combinations of letters and paintings; she is always unconsciously playing pranks. Sometimes she uses the hidden delights of the ancients to dissolve the immense grief in the letters, and sometimes she uses texts about trivial, worldly matters to complement images of lonely landscapes.

 She also has a scroll called Excursion. The children are jostling in the boat and looking around. The waves are surging, threatening but not dangerous. These children are innocent and ignorant of risk. The boat in the painting provides an escort for their childlike innocence. The painting is adorned with foreign flowers, grasses, and medicinal plants; it’s really not a simple Chinese gongbi painting. Western “childhood” is an invented idea, and so protecting “childhood” is also a modern mentality. The text next to the image is a letter from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince, to his mother. “I cannot tell you how delighted you will be at my situation… It’s not bad to be the director of such a big affair at twenty-nine. Is it not?”

In the painting, Peng Wei seems to break beautiful symmetry, hiding a young man’s worldly desires in landscapes and foreign lands. However, the youthful desires and carefree qualities in Saint-Exupéry’s letter are not without childlike innocence. Considering his participation in struggle against the Nazis and his eventual death in battle, has a youth who looks forward to the future on an afternoon excursion really accepted the end of his childhood?

 The painter’s mischievous, destructive behavior also has a childlike quality, but her way of thinking has changed with the times. When young, we are easily drawn to pure beauty, and only like to see the lovely part on the surface of the water. It is only after experiencing the difficulties of life that we are willing to dip below the surface to the less lovely things.

 I also like Peng Wei’s Embroidered Shoes and Brocade Robes. She painted beautiful ink and wash paintings on empty female bodies; she parodies classical pictures of ladies, but it also makes the viewer feel empty.

 Letters from a Distance is a rich series. When Peng Wei copies these letters, she inverts people’s usual visions of art and artists. An artistic life does not necessarily have to be a hermit’s life. In these letters, artists are bargaining for their work; Wagner was purposely looking to borrow money from aristocrats, without much success. The majority of the figures in the paintings are carefree, but the painters in the letters worry about survival and success. Their works are not the opposite side of life; the practice of art is actually the amalgamation of artworks and creative activities. The final works are simply crystallizations and photographs of the artists’ lives. The unconventional and even parsimonious lives of these artists are the other side of creating art; this and the beauty of the works are the complete truth of artistic life.

 Peng Wei has another interesting series that she calls Good Things Come in Pairs, in which she paints erotic paintings on thin silk shoe insoles.

 While traveling in Japan, I saw a lot of erotic paintings, containing men and women feverishly entwined, feet twitching in ecstasy. Comparatively speaking, Chinese erotic paintings seem almost bashful, and the majority are frozen in reluctant postures. The male parties often seem disengaged, and they certainly do not have the masculine vigor of the men in the Japanese erotic paintings. They don’t seem to be truly enjoying the act of love; it seems to be simply a step or a process in nourishing one’s vital energies. The women in the paintings are not really living beings; they are more akin to exquisite dolls. What ought to be libidinous sex takes on a rather indifferent quality.

Peng Wei paints erotic paintings in the bottoms of shoes, presented to viewers as voyeuristic delights. The clever placement of the paintings adds an additional illicit pleasure.

In an era governed by shame, people perform the repression of desire, and this taboo makes sex an act without dignity or satisfaction; in a more free-wheeling time, sex loses its illicit pleasure because it is casual and prevalent. The time in which Peng Wei made Good Things Come in Pairs hovered between discipline and dissolution, between “good old things” and “bad new things.” She captured a transient moment of change.

 Peng Wei’s paintings are very beautiful, so beautiful that they tempt viewers to degeneration and degradation.
 If we see literature and painting as expressions of an era, then two types of work coexist in every era. One type of work shouts. In paintings and essays, painters and authors howl behind their works. Their styles are exaggerated and eye-catching, and their voices are deafening; they attempt to inspire viewer introspection about their times and their world. The other type of work suffers. In these works, suffering artists present the trivialities of their lives, their spiritual hardships, their stooped postures, and their emotional distortions. The works seem to be describing a world and a period, but they are always spaces in which the artists enlarge their own pain.

 The times change quickly and severely, and the space for art has become increasingly narrow. The number of shouting and suffering artworks is certainly increasing, as if they are trying to catch the spirit of the times.

 However, the essence of this howling and wailing is self-evasion, rejecting sincere examination. This replaces true thought, because thought is by its nature inarticulate and reticent. These artists need to sink into their souls, to the very depths, before they can see their true desires and true beliefs. Only this will give them the courage to confront the conflicts and difficulties in their hearts.

 Peng Wei’s exhibition at the Suzhou Museum was called “I Thought of You,” which comes from a letter Dostoyevsky wrote to his brother just after he had been spared execution, returned from the execution site, and was about to go into exile. In his letter, he shares his understanding of life; he was neither worried nor despairing. He wrote, “…no more than a minute was left me to live. I thought of you … during the last minute, you alone were in my mind; only then I realized how I love you, dear brother mine!”

 After these artists sink into their souls and become completely quiet, they can see a person reflected in the soul’s surface.

 At the “I Thought of You” exhibition, the painting I liked best was a small, unobtrusive one. Amidst a forest of massive palm trees, an ancient beauty paints the plants in front of her, which are so much larger than herself. She possesses Gauguin’s soul.

 The painting moved me because I thought of Peng Wei painting in her studio. On behalf of ancient women, like the beautiful ladies in countless paintings, she is realizing a dream. Through her paintings, the viewer enters into a vast and profound world, a world that is much larger than the four walls of a boudoir.