Booth 3E06
Artist Peng Wei
The Next Step to Classics
The Next Step to Classics, the Tina Keng Gallery’s Kabinett project for the 2018 Art Basel in Hong Kong, ponders how classics sustains the intrinsic value through an underlying spirituality when they have become the source materials of history. How should artists envision the future when they make art? Mirroring the flux of Chinese contemporary art, Chinese artist Peng Wei presents her signature landscape albums and scrolls for our Kabinett project, as a parallel to The Divideand Continuation of Classicsat our main booth.
China has welcome the waves of wealth brought in by globalization in the wake of political turmoil of the past hundred years. Contrasted with the iconoclastic and pioneering attitude that characterized the first half of the 20thcentury, contemporary Chinese artists have shifted toward a more restrained aesthetic that resonates with traditional cultural heritage. In her adaptation of the traditional Chinese landscape painting, Peng Wei employs letters of notable Western authors as inscriptions in her work. In the form of ancient scrolls or albums, her painting-turned-installation manifests itself in its cultural and literary charm, allowing the viewer to reexamine the overarching influence of greater Chinese contemporary art and the seismic changes it has stimulated. The past of art is what concerns the artist — the wisdom, memory, melancholy, and sense of reality permeating the ancient works of the literati. Her approach, seemingly classical, innately detached, blends classical texts and contemporary concepts in her reinterpretation of landscape painting. Without relinquishing tradition, she finds an equilibrium between the classical and the contemporary in the ways of ancient legacy.
Western thought fuses with Eastern spirituality in Peng Wei’s practice, much like in the work of 20th-century masters Lin Fengmian and Zao Wou-Ki, who experimented with art forms in radical ways. Classics become the source materials of history, at the same time the fertile ground for future artists. Across generations, art spawns connections that link the past to the present, that straddle myriad cultural subjectivities in multiple contexts. The classics of today were the trends of yore; the classics of yesterday are the possibilities of tomorrow.
