Welcome to a world of stories. Diverging narratives unfold from This is Her—some transformed by space into pictures within pictures, reflections within reflections; others altered by time, weaving together tales of women across history—their love and loss, life and death.
The structure of the exhibition resembles the zhanghui style of traditional Chinese literature or layered narratives unfolding between screens in the exhibition galleries. The theme, Seven Days, represents the time span in which myriad stories unfold—enough for life-altering moments to occur, and a metaphorical space where transformations happen.
Peng Wei constructs stories through space, distance, and detail. She is both a writer and a reader, interpreting the stories of women and history, giving her works a textual and allusive quality—like a pair of shoes, always in dialogue.
In Peng’s works, “seeing” and “reading” are equally essential. This duality might stem from her admiration for the traditions of Dunhuang murals and Italian church frescoes. These images do more than visually impress; they convey stories, morals, and spirituality. If skillfully painted, they make the stories they depict believable.
Murals also inspire Peng’s storytelling approach. Many of her paintings begin with a narrative framework and structure, which she gradually fills with content. To propel these stories forward, she injects scenes, relationships, drama, and imagination—much like the mystical towers in her paintings, ascending into ever-more enigmatic heights.
In addition to scrolls, panoramic scenes, screens, and religious icons that merge Eastern and Western forms, Peng layers spaces. Within her paintings, she develops architecture reminiscent of the relationships between murals, caves, churches, and pagodas. Vertical dimensions alone are insufficient; she extends her stories into courtyards, terraces, and long, reaching corridors. These stories unfold everywhere: lattice windows, walkways, rooftops, grand halls, courtyards, pavilions, and towers. In doing so, she builds a city for women, creating a new social order for these narratives.
When space is exhausted, “time” emerges as a new dimension. Animation and video appear, blending music, rhythm, and shifts between two and three dimensions, making the stories even more vivid. The influence of episodic TV editing and novelistic chapter structures is also evident.
What are these stories about? First, they often originate from the perspectives of women, reflecting and interweaving their fates across different eras. Unlike religious paintings, Peng’s narratives avoid moral preaching. She prefers to depict ambiguous, open-ended moments full of suspense. Her storytelling is deeply postmodern—a collage of stray thoughts, fragmented dialogues, dreams, and intimate conversations with friends about personal dilemmas, memories, astrology, and travels. Her works are like strands from her life, pieced together into a vibrant tapestry, brocade woven as a gift to herself.
When these works converge in an exhibition space, they form a unique rhythm. Some cling to the walls, others float, fold, or hide within boxes. Some are set behind doors and windows, adding layers of distance between the stories and the viewer. Others appear as images in dark chambers—like an enlarged viewfinder, a miniature cinema, or Vermeer’s fabled camera obscura. These frames confine your gaze and define your world; you stand at the edge of a theater, observing the stage and entering the stories. Peng’s works transition from layered spaces to interactive spaces.
These dark chambers also use “perspective” to remind viewers of their relationship to the works. The audience is acutely aware of their position within the space, and in reading and judging the stories, they take on a role and perspective within them.
Stories vary in length. Elsewhere in the gallery, individual works resemble scattered dictionaries, poems, or phrases—some express the essence of a story, others its form, such as adapted Dunhuang tales reimagined on bodies or small paintings framed in classical designs.
Over millennia, women’s stories, once buried in different regions, are revived by Peng. These narratives are juxtaposed, mirrored, and placed in new contexts—not as simple equations but as emotionally and psychologically layered compositions. Their sense of time and space becomes boundless, evoking Peng’s intent to express feelings that extend infinitely, like branches and tendrils unfurling.
The allure of storytelling lies not in clarity but in its blanks, metaphors, and possibilities for development. In her latest Crown series, hats from diverse times and contexts occupy the center of her compositions. While the figures are absent, the hats linger, woven with an unfamiliarity that makes them more “portrait-like” than the figures themselves. Symbols of power and identity dissolve, replaced by the feminine gaze’s tactile and textural qualities. Sensation itself becomes the story—a subtle interplay of threads, undoing the rigidity of the hat’s symbolism and imbuing it with tenderness and emotion.
Storytellers will always remain, and the tales of Seven Days will never end. The word “seven days” carries an inherent sense of incompleteness, reflecting the exhibition’s essence—the delicate folds and grains where stories pivot and evolve.
Curator: Cui Cancan
November 19, 2024
