The Illusive Shadow of the Art of Feeling and Imagination: Oil Paintings by Peng Qi

　　By Chen Chiyu

　　Professor , School of Fine Arts, Tsinghua University

　　A most prominent phenomenon for the 20th century Chinese fine arts is that the imported oil painting became one of the dominant forms in painting arts. During the first thirty years of the century, nearly twenty art schools were established and began to produce students majoring in oil painting. The painting style experienced different phases of realism, symbolism and classicism. In the middle of 1980s a trend of modernist thoughts surged. From the 1990s on the young generation of artists started to absorb methods from the computer imagery design for innovation, whose senses are more acute and ways of thinking more contemporary. Mr. Peng Qi is one of these brilliant new artists after the 1990s.

　　During Peng Qi’s undergraduate and postgraduate studies, a solid foundation was laid by himself regarding the sketch and profiling skills. However, he was not satisfied with the realist style but focused on imagination. His Portrait Series, like a storehouse for human morphs from all walks of life, studies people’s facial looks in stylized methods. These works of his forecasted his own personalized road of an artist.

　　Peng Qi is an intelligent and talented artist. He positively portrays the world around him not by mere duplicating but through feelings from the soul and through thinking. Putting it another way, he is shy at depicting people, animal and things of the material world directly, but would rather transform them into images in dreams and illusions.

　　He pays special attention to small animals. As he put it, these elves are as if always talking and dancing one’s mind. He seems to be talking to these little beings through his soul and experiencing great joy in capturing them in his compositions. The little animals portrayed by him include cats, dogs, monkeys, pigs and butterflies, lively and interesting. He uses one colour for the background in order to make the images of the animals more intense. Some of these little elves are simple and honest, some are intelligent, some exaggerated and transformed, some obscure. Each piece of these works is a form of life. He spent two years on 100 pieces of them, each one glaring with vitality and childlike delight. These little elves became a major source of innovation of Peng’s composition. The inquisition about life and innocence is the primeval force of his creation.

　　When pursuing studies in Hubei, Peng was deeply affected by the romantic art of the Chu culture. His artistic imagination was inspired by the lacquer painting profile and colour of the ancient Chu people who worshipped Phoenix and created extraordinary lacquer painting art. He later composed a series of works in the theme of Pheonix. The Pheonix bird is idealized by glaring colours in a vortical drifting world. The paintings are mobilized by the narrating brush, full of spiritual characteristics of oriental art. The Phoenix series is a positive achievement by applying methods in the Chinese Romanticism into new practice.

　　Beside, Peng also did research on the western abstractionism and is trying to make use of it in new compositions. To be able to draw multifariously by following his heart is the mood he dreams of for his composition. He dissolves the freedom and flexibility of lines in traditional Chinese calligraphy into his paintings, making them carry the character of calligraphy writing. Additionally, he introduced some elements in designing into the abstract paintings, giving the general appearance of the painting a decorative esthetics. Without any doubt these works of art must be among the new achievements of modern abstractionism.

　　His means of artistic creation is various, which reflects the wish possessed by contemporary young artists to have different experiences during artistic creation. His large productions of the elves theme create an effect of hallucination, through wriggling touch of brush and harmonious colours, in which the viewers vaguely perceive the images of cat, Qilin(a chimerical and auspicious animal in Chinese culture) and so on. In his works, visual hallucination is united with metaphor. In the Glaring Bodies series, human bodies are illusionary and virtualized by being intertwined and concealed by colourful stripes. Inspired by the ancient Chinese fairy tales such as Shan HaiChing, the author boldly creates the weird image of man’s body with cat’s head. The abstract expression of this series reflects his thought on the essence of human body in terms of artistic philosophy. The human bodies are interwoven with coverings, neither of which is separable from the other. Man and animal are different and yet connected. The series forms a meaningful fine construction out of thoughts on human body and its expression by a young artist of the new millennium.

　　As for techniques, Peng combines traditional oil painting methods with ideas from acrylic, printing media and computer aided design arts, blending texture of oil painting with digital art, in order to produce a new type of painting with characters of a new era. In terms of colour expression, virtual and photoelectric effects are pursued so as to differ from copying colours in their natural state in the past of painting. With these methods, Peng creates a personal and stylized art of painting for us.

　　He is young, and full of potentials on his way of oil painting composition.