Exhibition｜PENG WEI·A ROOM WITH A STORY
Date｜04.29.2023-07.05.2023
Veune｜Nanchizi Museum, Beijing
In her work over the last three years, Peng Wei has transformed into a storyteller. In sixty paintings and twenty animated short films, she constructs emotionally connected yet standalone moving and still images. The stories in the painting are presented as fragments devoid of logic. She draws on the convoluted architectural forms in the Dunhuang murals, collaging and combining them, then breaking them up and moving them in animations. When placed within the Nanchizi Museum, the spaces fuse.
Life experiences and dreamworlds, reading and looking, ancient legends and conversations with friends have all been sources of inspiration for Peng’s Stories series. The threads are numerous, diverse, and strange, reflecting the ecosystem of female experience. In these fictional images of ancient people, stories are a stream of words and streams of words make up stories; flashes of internal predicaments suggest a woman’s desire for a nice place of her own.
Because we are inundated with information, we are losing “the ability to exchange experiences.” As Walter Benjamin once wrote, “The storyteller takes what he tells from experience—his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale.” These paintings and video narratives attempt to recollect the experiences of telling and seeing stories.
