Here's by Chance No.10  

2016 
180*96cm
Ink on Rice Paper
Plane Painting







Lost Stones

Peng Wei
 
Lost Stones were truly the beginning of my artistic road. From them, I found my own language and a technique that was different from traditional Chinese painting and different from other artists. I discovered that I could use this technique to alter the stones. Traditional Chinese things such as these have been painted by countless people, but this alteration is very personal, very present. For me, the present is not only the process of painting a stone from the first stroke to the last. Once a work is complete, it is past.
 
From 2001 to 2010, I continually departed from the stones and returned to them. In those ten years, I’ve seen changes, and stones are the same way, but the stones seem to look like me, and at the same time, they are slowly changing. I think this is extremely interesting. I discovered that stones are old things that I can paint outside of my other series. For me, painting stones is like recharging a battery. When I have worked on a series until I am very familiar with it and my enthusiasm has waned, I return to the stones, and they give me new enthusiasm.
 
I think Lost Stones are a past style that proves the present. They are deprived of all classical implications, leaving only designs to be transformed into a kind of historical memory. They remove cultural meanings and thus gain the possibility of a new culture. But I do not want to prove my contemporariness, because the concept of the term “contemporary art” came from the West. However, I do want to prove that Chinese ink paintings are games with established rules. In particular, I want to show how Chinese people’s concepts of time, the past, and the present are different from those of Westerners. Among ancient Chinese painters there existed a very philosophical turn of phrase, “I loathe that I cannot behold the ancients, and I loathe that the ancients cannot behold me.”

From the Chinese perspective, "the ancients" and "I " are two dots on the same timeline; whether they meet or not is what matters.This is why I never take into account contemporary or tradition when I paint stones. I do not care about repetition;when something is repeated,its position on the timeline has been moved.Time does not repeat itself. Or I should say, time is sameness and repetition.