Sprinting Forward – Looking Back
Chi Peng ( de )
Young Chinese Artists, The Next Generation, Prestel Verlag, 2008-9
Chi Peng’s digitally processed photographs seem restlessly moving in search of a goal. What he proposes visually hits the target dead-on; here the human is a lone warrior – even love relations become public acts mirroring the self.
Up until 2005, the Beijing artist’s fantastic yet real scenarios took place in the Chinese capitol, but after that they have dwelt increasingly in places outside of China. With the 2007 series Journey to the West, they have even moved into the realm of myth. The room installation Soft (2008) changes up the medium entirely, using 700 bed covers to build a bastion of temporary security.
Looking back, Chi Peng compares his studies – completed at the renowned Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing – with a pond full of croaking frogs, all practicing the high jump. It quickly became clear to him that his path would not lead to a specialty in painting or to the imitation of real objects or other artworks. In the combined play of concrete locations and flights of fancy, his pictures tell highly personal stories dealing with, for example, gender issues or homosexuality.
His frieze-like works, often a meter long, avoid portraying a beginning or end. Emulating the effect of film stills, Chi Peng captures moments of intense psychic stress, physical exertion, or arousal. Thematically as well as technically, his pictures could not be more current. Chi Peng senses that digital photography and its opportunities for virtual manipulation (with the computer program Photoshop) grant his interests their most authentic articulation. His method attains both purpose and sensuality, as he meticulously constructs the scenes to be photographed, brings in friends and acquaintances as extras, composes the landscape, and even designs and tailors the costumes.
In the series Sprinting Forward (2004–5), paranoia pursues the artist’s alter ego who multiplies himself and flees, mostly naked, through the Chinese capital. Anyone familiar with Beijing will recognize the locations. In Apollo in Transit (2005), it’s the wall of the Forbidden City where a montage of figures find themselves curled up in oversized raindrops. In another image of the series, Chi Peng is stranded in front of the curved glass façade of the Hyatt Hotel, while glowing red airplanes fly past toward the horizon.
The Dream-Series (2006) pursues the theme of an East-West axis, incorporating the Brandenburg Gate. We might ask ourselves which association appears more threatening: the traditional Chinese, in which the individual wiles away his life as a compliant but secure member of a group – or the kind of metropolitan loneliness Chi Peng articulates so well.
The photo series I Fuck Me (2005) brings no relief, reducing homoerotic sex to a lonely and yet often public act of masturbation. Passionate togetherness becomes a virtual conflation of a doubled ego. Love in the time of egomaniacal self reference?
Chi Peng considers his series Journey to the West (2007), comprised of twelve photographs, to be his most important work to date. It reflects his usual elements of autobiography and critique, but expanded into a mythological and also inter-media dimension. Incorporating costuming, elaborated head ornamentation, and mask-like face painting one finds at the traditional Beijing Opera, Chi Peng transforms himself into the monkey-king Sun Wukong. There is no child in China who isn’t enamored of this crafty fable character. But it’s not the classic Journey to the West that interests the artist so much as the legend of the flying monkey king which is able transform into seventy-two different forms, and which has been adapted in countless Chinese and Japanese comics, TV series, and movies.
The titles of the Journey photos play on central themes of the classic story. The vertical-format work Five Elements Mountain shows Chi Peng, alias Sun Wukong, captured in a knotted spiral of skyscrapers. Pictures like Red Boy and Three Fights against the White Bone Demon I evoke more concrete allusions to humiliating childhood experiences. In Mountain, more than six meters long, the fantasy figure of the monkey king, exhausted, fl oats on a cloud through a craggy mountainscape wrapped in fog. Everyone familiar with traditional Chinese art will see in the details of the arrangement just how carefully Chi Peng has kept to the genre’s formal guidelines of motif and perspective. This work actually references Wang Shen’s masterpiece of the Sung Dynasty The Light Snow in the Fishing Village. But now the traditional work has become an opportunity for the artist’s own personal reflection
When Chi Peng takes on the personality of the monkey king, he mirrors, kaleidoscopically, the relevant aspects of his own, self-determined life. “In the Journey series, it was my primary goal to find the images that would honestly and devotedly express my memories. That attitude is prerequisite for my art.” His newest work, the room installation Soft, uses 700 bed covers to create an oasis of stillness accessible to the visitor. Childhood memories and the current need for breathing space beyond the demands of daily life come together in this work. It once more makes it clear that the life of his generation in China, despite all its material advantages and freedoms, is a continual balancing act between nearly unlimited possibilities and the struggle for personal integrity.
The interview with the artist took place in April 2008 in Beijing. I want to thank Zhao Chong for his efforts as a translator and adviser.
In: Young Chinese Artists. The Next Generation, Editors: Christoph Noe, Xenia Piëch und Cordelia Steiner.
Prestel Publishing September 2008
Hardcover, 296 pages
310 images
