From April 21 to July 5, Peng Wei presented “A Room with a Story” at NanchiziMuseum in Beijing. Working as both artist and curator for this exhibition, sheshowed new works from herStories series made over the last three years, including sixty paintings and twenty animated short films. Her stories come from everyday life, dreams, myths, legends, and even gossip and the news; they mix past and present, reality and fantasy.

       In her past ink paintings on embroidered shoes, women’s bodies, and robes, as well as her current transformation into a storyteller and her experiments with animation, she is“using traditional methods to resist tradition.”

       In early May, Yitiao Art met up with Peng Wei to see this show in its Chinese garden spaceand to discuss her new work and her new exhibition. In an era of information overload, do we still need stories, and do we still have stories in common?
 
1. A Mixture of Myths, Legends, and Real Stories

       Nanchizi Museum is located down a hutong near the Forbidden City. As you step across stones placed in the water to enterthe courtyard, you enter a completely different world. This is the world of tasteful and restrainedSuzhou-style gardens, complete with a pond, covered corridors, a pleasingly asymmetrical ornamental hill, and refined plantings. Carved windows frame your view of whitewashed walls and black roof tiles. The pavilion on the rocks in the corner of the courtyard echoes the towers inPeng Wei’s paintings.

       After the exhibition opened, a stream of friendshad arranged to visit the exhibition, greeting her with pleasantries and hugs. When she talked about something interesting during the interview, she smiled first, making you wonder what she was going to say next.

       This was the first time she experimented with being both artist and curator in an exhibition. She loves Walter Benjamin’s work, and the exhibition is divided into three parts, “Dreamworlds,” “Travel,” and “Play and Pedagogy,” based on hisThe Storyteller: Tales Out of Loneliness.

       In his book, the reader follows the protagonist through time and space, chatting with writers from the past. Peng Wei’s newStories series incorporates everyday life, dreamworlds, myths, legends, gossip, and news. She mixes past and present, Chinese and foreign stories together, echoing the novel. She alternates the form of the narrative between painting and animation as a way of communicating with her audience.

       On entering the courtyard, the first works the visitor sees come fromFestivalseries, featuring the Mid-Autumn Festival, the Double Seventh Festival, the Hungry Ghost Festival, and GaldanNamchot. People hurry around the paintings performing ceremonies related to the festival,punctuated by occasional appearances from mythical or legendary figures.

       In one tower, a woman flies over to light a bronze lamp during GaldanNamchot. Forthe Double Seventh Festival,a young woman stands on the roof to catch the dew and meet her lover.These festival scenes are intermingled with fragments of everyday life, such as arguing, eating, and delivering letters, as well as robberies and other mishaps. The festivals in the paintings are magical times and places in which anything can happen.

       The Mid-Autumn Festival work was inspired by the story of Chang’e fleeing to the moonin Lu Xun’s Old Tales Retold. No longer a hero who shot down the extra suns, Hou Yi is a frustrated middle-aged man hunting crows.Wanting to escape their impoverished life, Chang’eswallowed an elixir of immortality and fled to the moon. Peng has also managed to include crows, a rabbit pounding medicine with a mortar and pestle, and the mid-autumn custom of burning a small tower as an offering for a good harvest.

       Festival series continues Peng’s previous Seven Nights, telling parallel stories in different spaces. A key difference is that Seven Nights depicts dreams, whileFestival and the entire Stories series present reality mixed with a dose of fantasy.

       Through these festival stories, she wants to articulate special moments. Everyone has different feelings and experiences, and even on holidays that symbolize reunion, people may also be going through hard times. Whether sad or joyful, people can always find comfort in festivals.
 
2.Architecture: TheStage on which Stories Unfold
 
       In her Stories series, architecture—towers, corridors, and rooms—is the most important stage for these stories. Because her stories seldom feature cause-and-effect relationships or continuous narratives, fragmented stories are placed within spaces imbued with different atmospheres.

       When asked why she painted architecture, Peng Wei said, “If I had painted a building when I was younger, then it may just have been a building, without any particular meaning. Now, I have something more to say, and it was at this point that I discovered that what I had to say needed a setting. I wanted it to have layer after layer, like pushing open one door after another.”
 
Towers: Vertical Spaces

       In the museum’s main hall, Towerseries hangs in midair. Even though they are painted on thin xuanpaper mounted on transparent acrylic, they retain a monumental weight.

       “Towers are layers of spaces and stories, or layers of desiresand spiritual dimensions. As the space of the tower stretches gradually upward, realities, dreams, legends, Bible or Buddhist stories, and people’s feelings about life or visions of death, are like fragments that can be reconstructed or assembled,” Peng Wei said.

       The stories are layered with each floor in the tower, developing in parallel or in a progression. Peng Weipaints floor by floor, and she has said that she usually has a sketch for the first and second floors, but the higher the towers go, the more the story“takes off.” In one case, a boat bursts through a third-floor window and in another, an elephant looks ready to bring the entire building crashing down.

       The most moving tower is the one about death. Now that she is entering middle age, she says that she has “started thinking about the age at which I’ll die.”

       The stories begin when the figures enter the tower. The second floor holds the funeral. On the third floor, legendary figures Fuxi and Nüwa appear, with a horse fetching the departed person’s soul, a common image in funerary paintings, to one side, and the deceased’s mourning relatives to the other. Pengusually paints ancient figures, but she depicts the cycle of life and death, which everyone experiences, trying her utmost to depict a quiet grief.

       On the roof, a figure that looks a lot like Pengseems to be calmly looking out over everything that is happening.
 
Corridors: Horizontal Spaces

       After you take the stairs to the second floor of the museum, you are greeted with the horizontal Corridor series that hangs in a darker space.

       IfToweris a magical realist novel, then Corridoris a thriller.The depths of these painted corridors conceal all kinds of mysteries, but viewers cannot see everything; they can only guess the direction of the story from the clues Peng divulges. In several scenes that pique the viewer’s curiosity, they see the feet and skirt of a woman lying on the ground, and the remnants of a banquet. Is the woman climbing the tree behind the building a fleeing assailant?
 The corridor is flanked by immortals with the heads of humans and the bodies of birds, as well as panicked, stunned bystanders.Corridor is an extension of Peng Wei’s previous Peep series, which gives viewers close-up glimpses into the secrets of these stories, leaving only suggestions and metaphors to offer insight into the figures’ inner worlds. She tells the stories of Corridorthrough peeks into these horizontal spaces.

       “As an architectural space, corridors are very special. Because they have all those pillars, they’re a bit like prison. When you’re trying to sort out your own thinking, it’s like you’re pacing inside your own personal jail.”
When we were in the exhibition, we moved through different rooms like the people in the paintings. The real and painted spaces constantly overlap in the exhibition, telling stories about one another.

       Peng Wei, as the curator,and the exhibition design team made special modifications to the exhibition space, including dividing the main second-floor room into smaller rooms to create a meandering viewing experience that would echo the winding paths in the courtyard. They pulled blue and green from the buildings in the paintings to use as the primary tones in the design of the show.

       In her assessment of the exhibition, she said, “I seem to have made an ink exhibition that no one has seen or done before.”
 
3. “The Best Thing about Making Art is that You Can Smuggle in Your Own Contraband”
 
       While Peng Wei was creating new work, a trip to Dunhuang provided a stroke of inspiration. “Look, the buildings in the Dunhuang wall paintings were painted very freely; he painted a building with two strokes, and a pillar and a patch of tile were painted with one color, a pairing of blue and green.”

       She looked at the wall paintings in more than one hundred of the Mogao Caves over and over again, including the Mount Wutai painting inCave 61, which became an important reference for her paintings of architecture. This wall painting is like a map,accurately depicting a full view of Mount Wutaiwith mountain peaks, a host of temples and towns, and many of the legends associated with the place. The painting shows what life was like at that time for a trader with his carrying poles, a woodcutter, and a traveler on horseback, offering an immense volume of information.

       When looking at wall paintings, Peng Wei is always drawn to the composition, the patterns on the buildings, and the small figures at the edges; she sets aside the stories that the paintings want to tell and their intended purposes. “When I saw it, I thought that the composition was great and that the buildings painted on this mountain were so magical…They were actually painted in the service of religion, but I didn’t care. I’m a classic visual creature.”

       She also noticed that the Dunhuang painters often“smuggle in their own contraband.” For example, one of the painters added a mouse that was unrelated to therest of the story.

       “I also really wanted to use architecture to work out some of my little ideas. The best thing about making art is that it’s entirely your own contraband.”

       In the story of the Hungry Ghost Festival, she added bandits, a reference to the Dunhuang painting in which 500 bandits attain Buddhahood, as well as soldiers and officers abandoning their posts after drinking,giving the story a sense of drama and absurdity.She describes her work as quotation, projecting ancient architecture and figures into the present and transforming them into stories.

       Her stories are contemporary; she has never simplywanted to recreate ancient paintings.From her early paintings ofstones, robes, and shoes, she was clear: “I was actually just picking out things I liked from Ming and Qing ink painting catalogs, antique clothing illustrationbooks,and fashion magazines. I used similar materials—the lines, washes, and coloring. These different subjects or patterns are one thing to me—readymades.”
The exhibition also features a few of her previous series, including Hi-Ne-Ni, in whichshe paints women’s stories on women’s bodies made of xuan paper, and Good Things Come in Pairs, in which she paints figures inside shoes. These painting installations represent her presence because they are related to the body.
 
4.We All Need Stories

       Within herStoriesseries, Peng Wei also made twentyanimationsentitled We All Need Stories. She explained, “Based on the many small paintings inA Room with a Story, I made the animationWe All Need Stories, which is an assemblage or construction. I have always played this game of destruction and construction, construction and destruction.”

       Peng says that, in the past, she really hated looking at paintings on electronic screens. No matter how high-resolution the pictures were, they could not surprise people with the textures of the materialsorthe dimensions of the works. But when she was forced to do online exhibitions, she had to begin considering how to show a painting on a screen. She took pictures of the works in a studio, set up exhibition lights, and imagined the figures in the painting suspended in space, flying back and forth, in an attempt to capture the exhibition that she had envisioned in her mind—this is how new plotlines emerged.

       A Tower from Day into Night was Peng Wei’s first animation. She worked on it for more than two years, switching between two or three different producers. At the beginning, she just wanted to start with a blank piece of paper, then paint the construction ofa tower through to its collapse and disappearance. Later, she added an average day around the tower, with lamps lit inside the rooms, and people walking past it. In the end, the work returns to a piece of white paper,and the entire thing seems like a dream.

       With every animation, she retained her original intention, always ending with a finished painting. The characters in the animation “move clumsily,”without any dazzling special effects. She said,“At the beginning, I knew that I would not be technically better than other animation artists, but I wanted their movements to be interesting.”

       InFarewell,everything in acalm long take is permeated with the grief of a farewell, and the animation expresses the unfinished nature of the painting.The production cycle for animations is quite long; the scenario had to be constantly changed and the details constantly enriched. She spent significant time considering aspects as small as which way of throwing a feather would be more interesting. Peng did all of the editing and scoring and made a rough cut on her iPad.

       Every time she finishes an animation, she shares it with friends. “It’s more interesting to watch animations than to look at paintings on a phone,”her friends have told her. She feels that this is her way of resisting the ubiquity of screens, “so that they [the paintings] at least coexist with the screens.”
 
       Storytellers, video, 2022. The four storytellers are:Peng Wei appears as a 3D rendering to discuss the ideas behind the artworks and the show; a European sculpture transformed into British author Virginia Woolf reads her landmark text A Room of One’s Own; a Han funerary sculpture from Peng Wei’s collection representing late Han writer Cai Wenji reads “Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute”; and young performerDarby Hu speaks about the difficulties of the younger generation and the anxieties of middle-aged women in a southwestern dialect.
 
       The final work in the show is Storytellers. Played simultaneously on four screens, women from different periods, at different life stages, and from different nations tell their stories.This work is much like a storyteller taking a bow at the end of a story.

       Peng tells stories, but she also likes watching stories. When asked what kinds of stories she enjoys in her spare time, we had thought that she would like something more stream-of-consciousness, but she replied that she prefers strong plotlines and realism, particularly American shows like Homeland and The Crown. She also mentioned the recent hit Succession. She said it truly felt like you were there, watching them fight it out and jockey for position in a very real, provocative way.
 
       When the interview was nearly over, Peng Wei mentioned a half-finished new piece that was still in her studio. She had drawn fromThe Seven Works of Mercy by Caravaggio and the Good Deed Sutra painting in Dunhuang to tella new story that would resonate with bothChinese and Western audiences.

        “In all of my paintings and animations, I deal with things that people experience in their lives—birth, aging, illness, death, love, hate, and longing. These stories may not be terribly sunny or happy,” Peng Wei said.“However, we still really need stories, and we definitely need stories in common.” Her Stories series remains to be continued.
 
Editor: Li Ningyu
Managing Editor: Ye Li
 
Permission to use this article was received from Yitiao Art. Please contact the original author for permission to reprint.