She draws on ancient paintings for her motifs, as exhibited in the work included in the Princeton University Art Museum collection, Autumn of Tang Dynasty (唐人秋色), 2008.Ī&A graduate student Zhuolun Xie, who translated for Wei during the conversation at Art on Hulfish, said “When she makes the mannequin sculptures, she uses two kinds of readily available materials-ancient Chinese paintings and discarded mannequins-to tell her own story.” “To her, curatorial work is exactly like art making in this respect,” said Xie. More recently, after discovering two mannequins in the garbage, Wei turned to painting on three-dimensional torsos. They make an atmosphere and attract you to look.” She compared a mall to a museum “because everything is displayed very beautifully. She points to her love of lingering in shopping malls, for example, as the impetus for painting on shoes. Rather than painting with a specific agenda or concept in mind, Peng Wei explained that she has always simply painted what she likes from her everyday experiences. Peng Wei demonstrates her brushwork technique (Photo credit: Kirstin Ohrt) Her inspiration stems from her daily life and ranges from ancient painting or Italian frescos to conversations with friends, American TV shows, or window shopping. Her father’s extraordinary mastery of painting, she says, equipped her with a rich set of skills that afford her the versatility to swtich between methods based on the feeling or subject matter that she is rendering. Now a globally-known artist, Wei learned her craft from her father beginning at the age of two. “When I look back at my work, some of the paintings tell me ‘you did it! you are an artist.’ ” Wei’s presentation was ideally suited to the theme of Wang’s and Li’s course, which aimed “to highlight ‘Women and Gender’ not only as a valuable academic framework but also as lived experiences, disciplinary tools, and enduring poetics that shape a significant part of Chinese art,” as Li put it. Peng Wei Discusses Her Work with Students “The qualities of sensuality and allegorical enigma are what make Peng Wei’s recent works so riveting,” said Wang. Wang sees Wei’s paintings as exploring the body and gender in multi-layered and temporal-spatial units. Wei’s focus on the lived experience of daily life especially resonated with Wang, who saw in them “the quality, poetics, and incremental sense of what life is about,” how the body is embedded in these. “Even though the brushwork system and some of the motifs and scenes in her works exhibited there looked familiar to me as a scholar of Chinese art, they gained new life and were given fresh meaning beyond what I could have imagined.” “I was impressed by her creative ways of referencing traditional Chinese painting and literature,” said Wang. Wang first encountered Wei’s works in 2015 at her solo exhibition “Come Full Circle” in Taipei. Across all of the venues, Wei spoke with gracious and disarming honesty about her approach, inspiration, reservations, and triumphs. Participants of the workshop crowd around Peng Wei and her demonstration work (Photo credit: Kirstin Ohrt)īeijing-based artist Peng Wei visited Princeton in late November 2023 to present her work in three contexts: as a lecture in the course ART 389/GSS 390/EAS 389 “Women and Gender in Chinese Art” co-taught by Professor Cheng-hua Wang and Department of Art & Archaeology graduate student Yutong Li, as a painting workshop for the Program in Visual Arts, and in conversation with Princeton University Art Museum curator Zoe Kwok.
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