Peng Wei was born in Sichuan and started learning painting at the age of two. Intimately bound to the medium of ink painting, she has the ability to transcend past and present, East and West. Since the age of 26, she has sought out her own artistic language, painting on round fans, shoes, and papier-mâché mannequins. More recently, she has become fascinated by stories and painted a series of extraordinary ink scrolls underpinned by her personal experience. Peng Wei held “A Room with a Story” at Nanchizi Museum in Beijingfrom April 21 to July 5. These sixty paintings and twenty animated short films recollect the experiences of telling and seeing stories.
 
01.Playing Between East and West

       When I saw Peng Wei, my first impression was of contrast. Before I visited her studio,the Eastern women, whether violent or mournful, from her series Old Tales Retoldfrequently came to mind. These images made me wonder what kind of woman created them. Perhaps because of their impressions of traditional ink painting or her head of smooth black hair, when first meeting Peng, people generally describe her as elegant, graceful, restrained, or even delicate. The first contrast is the marked one between her work and her person.

       During the shoot, whether she was leaning against the wall or reading by the window, she evinced a natural, settled quality, and she even said that she wanted to “look fiercer,” almost as if she were trying to break fixed impressions of her or her paintings.Talking with her, particularly about her work, is another experience. She occasionally flashes a mischievous smile, as if she has just pulled off a prank:“InLetters from a Distance, I copied letters from artists and other famous people, but I purposely wrote the text in a compact way. This really dense writing makes people feel like they should read it, but they’re ultimately unable to.”The ladies’ cigarette occasionally lit in her hand, which evokes a knowingUma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, is the second point of contrast.
Contrast is a major inspiration for Peng Wei.She likes reading artists’ letters,which show a side to these luminaries that is decidedly different from what people expect but may be more authentic. For example, the letters that world-famousmusicians such as Beethoven and Mozart sent to family and friends share emotional and dramatic moments—the disputes that arise from minor events or unimportant people and the stress of asking for the meager remuneration for a composition.In these moments, Peng sees living, dimensional people, and not the stereotype of greatness. She is fascinated by this contrast, which is one of the critical aspects of Wild Geese Descending on Level Sands.

       The other critical aspect is the Chinese zither, which offers a similar sense of contrast. In 2017, Peng became deeply interested in the zither song “Wild Geese Descending on Level Sands.”As one of the Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers, Wild Geese Descending on Level Sandswas a common subject for painters and other literati. Though she declares herself tone-deaf, she has been playing the zither since she was young.For her, learning the zither was like practicing calligraphy—it was not difficult to learn the basics. If you simply follow the score, you can generallyplay something after studying on your own for a time, just as you can always pick up a brush and write.Though she is not a skilled player, she is deeply drawn to the poetic significance of geese in Chinese culture:goodbyes, long journeys,letters,longing,lofty aspirations, and solitary bravery.

       Four years later, even though she is still exploring the zither,she presented the show “Migrations of Memory - The Lyricism and Power of Music” at the Cleveland Museum of Art, which ran through May of last year. In works that unite painting and installation, she continued her Letters from a Distanceseries, juxtaposing Chinese landscape paintings with the letters of Western musicians on folded album leaves.One side offers a peaceful, comfortable landscape, while the other side presents emotional, intense letters.The contrast and tension of restraint and boldness, image and text,East and West leap off the paper.She also chose to display the works on music stands—the angle of the open leaves and the inverted triangles of the music standsare reminiscent of a flock of geese flying through the sky.

       Breaking with convention and combiningEastern and Western, traditional and contemporary in unexpected ways is a mix-and-match game at which Peng Wei excels.This may be related to her long-standing love of shopping—she likes looking at all kinds of products.She seems to resonate with something Andy Warhol once said:“When you think about it, department stores are kind of like museums.”There is always something fun and interesting in the “department store” of art. Books, music, films, blogs,talk shows, or the myriad other things related to personal experience can all be part of her paintings.
 
02. The Heart and the Universe

       Peng Wei began learning painting from her father at the age of two and won numerous awards in her youth. She studied at Nankai University for seven years—four years studying ink painting and three years studying aesthetics—then served as an editor atArt (Meishu) for seven years. Beginning with scholar’s rocks, Peng gradually explored her own method and style.“I discovered that I could use this technique to distort these stones—something so traditional and Chinese, something that countless people have painted before me—but this distortion was very personal, very contemporary.” For her, painting scholar’s stones was like finding a door and walking through it, but also like breaking down the door and escaping. There is no construction without destruction.

       The key to destruction is this distortion; it is a translation, a kind of empathy,or an internalization.When she looks at Viewing the Pass Listattributed to Qiu Ying, Peng sees specific people and scenes from her life in the scholars assembled to hear the exam results. Even though Tolstoy and Dostoevskywrote their classic novels one hundred years ago, she still feels that they relate to her experience. She often speaks about a “private tradition,”which is that tradition must have a relationship with the artist’s personal experience.“Even when dealing with the same subject, what’s most important is who painted it.”

       However, she arrived at this realization only after a few setbacks. In 2002, Peng Wei was obsessed with painting shoes.One afternoon, she showed a friend her paintings, and theysaid, “Did you know that Andy Warhol also painted a lot of shoes?”She had believed herself to be alone in this discovery, but the idea that other people had actually been there first hit her like a bolt from the blue. Fortunately, she was not preoccupied with this idea for long. She feels that other people are otherpeople, and she is her own person.“Different times, spaces, people, and thinkingcan change the same subject. They can meet and inspire one another.”

       In her later work, she felt even fewer restraints. Among her subsequent series, people seldom noticed her performance and videoThat Time and That Place. Because a friend had been gone for 81days,Pengwas reminded of her childhood game of drawing a watch on her wrist. She recorded the watch she drew on her arm every morning. By afternoon, the watch was barely visible, bearing witness to the quiet passage of time. Initially, she did not think of it as a work of art; she simply felt like doing it at the time. Much later on, even after the habit had nothing to do with her friend, it came to be her way of dealing with time and acts of God. For her, art stems from personal experience.

       Peng Wei has never been constricted by dimension or medium: “The form always serves the content.”She has created both framed paintings that can be held in one hand and50-meter-long scrolls.She copies letters and paints paintings on album leaves and scrolls, fitting them with silk ribbons and wooden boxeslike elegantlittle installations. She paints figures from the Italian Renaissance onto round fans given as presents, creating a kind of spatio-temporal intersection. She covers mannequins in xuan paper, which she paints withlandscapes, insects, and exotic figures, breaking down two-dimensionality to unifypainting, sculpture, and installation.She is constantly blurring, distorting, and shattering the boundaries of ink.

       At the same time, she pursues a sense of clumsiness or carelessness. The wrinkled texture of the xuan paper on the mannequins, the rough edges from when the paper is cut, the natural yet overwrought style of the letter text, or the transformation of the figures in the paintings into animations all show that she does not require too much complexity or neatness in her work.“I felt it was fine for them to move clumsily, foolishly, because that suits the texture of my paintings.”She seeks out something appropriate and natural, that unifies form and content. Within the bounds of the heart or of personal experience, Peng Wei shows us the vast universe ofcontemporary ink art.
 
03.“We All Need Stories”

       If Peng Wei’s previous work looks inward, expressing her obsession with the materiality of a single object and drifting outside of narrative, thenSeven Nights, Old Tales Retold,We All Need Stories,and her other series since 2018show that sheno longer keeps her distance from narrative.

       The shift from detachment to involvement did not happen overnight. During her 2017 solo show “I Thought of You”at the Suzhou Museum, she was constantly asked, “What stories do your paintings tell?”Pengalways felt a little disappointed with the question. If the paintings were good, why would she need to catch the eye with a story?
 
       In the years that followed, Peng saw wall paintings in Dunhuang and frescoes in Italy, such as Piero della Francesca’s The Legend of the True Cross. These paintings told outlandishstories, but because of thepainters’ skills, she was instantly moved and realized what a good narrative was. If the artist was sufficiently skilled, even bizarre stories could become a touching, indispensable part of an image.Peng found this idea very exciting and a major challenge, so she decided to experimentwith it.

       Over the last few years, she has depicted her dreams at night in fine black and white lines that seem divorced from the xuan paper, telling bizarre stories that take place under the flying rafters and corbel brackets of traditional Chinese buildings with overhead shots or quick glances.After reading Paragons of Feminine Virtue, The Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars, and other ancient books about “feminine virtue,”she was shocked by the stories of modelfilial women, and the images of women in these books felt fresh and worth examining in a contemporary context. As a result, she used grand freehand (xieyi) techniques to paint single figures on 50-meter-long scrolls as part ofher Old Tales Retold series.

       The massive scale of these works creates immense visual impact, but Peng Wei’s paintings are not “hysterical” screams. She has always maintained distance and restraint—the blank backgrounds and fine black ink lines appear calm and tranquil but are actually evidence of a dangerous uncertainty.“I always think about what is appropriate and where I should stop.The self is certainlyimportant, but I didn’t want it to take over the work.”

       Whether she paints landscapes or figures, they are decidedly different from traditional, antique paintings. Women are the protagonists in Peng’s art, which makes perfect sense to her, because it reflects her experience of life as a woman.For centuries, most traditional ink painters were men. Even if they painted women, they did it from a man’s perspective, and people took this approach for granted. Peng’swork provides a way to examine history and the past, while also showing the value of a woman’s perspective and personal experience. She likes the novels of Italian writer Elena Ferrante precisely because they convey common emotions and an aesthetic that can involve everyone.

       Peng Wei was intrigued by Ferrante’s many years of anonymity:“Perhaps I should have done that from the beginning.”Shealso appreciatesMarcel Duchamp’s approach:“When he was asked why he didn’t paint, he replied, ‘I don’t owe the world a painting.’ Despite that, he spent more than twenty years secretly making a work that people didnot find out about until he died, which is a rather Zen approach.When the practice is separated out, creators donot find their identity as painters or artists quite so important.Kafka spent his life as a government clerk, and he didn’t owe the world an essay, but his novels changed the course of literature.”
“If you were to introduce yourself, what would you say?”
“I would say that I’m Peng Wei.”
 
-FromHarper’s Bazaar Art