YU PENG OFFICIAL SITE

 

 

 

Yu Peng's painting is a mock rustic hut in an urban reflection, a dollhouse and a papier-m~ch~ garden. It is a yearning for an apotheosis of sophistication in everyday things, a child's play, and painting consciously modeled on historical sources. One takes these up as gameboards for the unwinding of nostalgia and ennui. But handle with care. If one only reads off the symbols and stylistic references one misses both sensuous fantasies and richer, succulent irony. A tart charm lies in the tenuousness of these expansive views. These paintings can't be taken seriously as the template of a critical or thorough philosophical position. They may even encourage a gentle, laughing regard for things that are perhaps terribly important. Finally though it is not a cynic's leer, but a lover's smile for many and orderless possibilities.

 

How to speak of an understanding of these paintings that is also an orientation toward one's experience and culture? The work should be considered metaphorically, in terms of its representations, its relation to matters of style and one's expectations. In part this is also to consider the paintings in ways that might explain what would otherwise be anomalies and mistakes. It is less interesting to propose judgments that diminish what might otherwise be possible. And then, too, Yu Peng marks ways that encourage one to see some sense as well——though of course, he is not present and we cannot participate in the desires and energies which led him to paint. Nevertheless, we too may make of these works an embodiment or relief for our emotions and thoughts, as much as any bath in the hot springs of Yang Ming Mountain or a bowl of fresh noodles.

 

We respond to style and representations all at once, but it is difficult to speak of both simultaneously. Yu Peng lets loose rambling recollections of contemporary and past times through the copious objects he represents and the manner in which he paints them. Wandering through his crowded painting one stumbles past great piles of bonsai, furniture, boats, trees, and his family and friends attired in antique fancy-dress. Mountains and scholarly gardens put urban concrete blocks out of mind, while men in ties and mock Taoist eccentrics hide away in hedges.

 

The ink and its composition make for no simple continuation of tradition, but principally recall past time and the honied nostalgia through which it shimmers. Perhaps there was a moment when at least ink, paper and ordinary brushstrokes were commonplace and beneath notice; but that moment is not ours. We cannot help but also see the medium as "traditional." We cannot displace the knowledge that they are nothing like the stuff of modem commercial images; nor can we regain an ignorance of other sorts of contemporary painting. One supposes that the choice of traditional form is therefore calculated and contrived, intertwined with Yu Peng's manipulation of the medium.

 

Historically unchanged forms of art and culture may be presented purely, unpolluted by all the new context in which one experiences them. One can run away into painted mountains, cherishing clear dreams over a murky awareness of a complex present. One can momentarily cut oneself away, gaining brief and remote solace. A common mode of experience to be sure, but one which Yu Peng's world only admits to disappoint.

 

The academic or amateur escapist may become successively irritated by the appearance of contemporary portraits and nudes, calligraphic graffiti resembling the script placed around Hong Kong by the "King of Kowloon," jokes at the expense of old Confucian and Buddhist customs (tea-offerings and literati pleasures), and ultimately by the style of the painting. The brushstrokes a bit too loose and maladroit; the colours a bit garish; the stylistic borrowings so incredibly wide, nourished by photo reproductions that are everyman's experience of tradition.

 

The symbolic and historical references are careful, but private, tending to solipsism and chaos. To condemn such work follows only from an application of severe standards, untempered by wit. And where can one find such standards in any case? Contemporary experience of Yu Peng's work takes place in an atmosphere where both orthodox and critically Utopian views toward culture seem inadequate or linked to aggressive demands for certainty that satisfy psychological impulses more than any analytical ones. The sense of apathy toward politics and institutions that is felt in Yu Peng's vision of culture is as much a case of principled immaturity as one of irresponsible hedonism. It would flatter Yu Peng if we placed him among drunken poets who could value play and innocence beyond doctrine.

 

A conventional literary reading of symbols and allusions is less encouraged than cut loose. Mountains and flowers and the other properties are offered for their sensual pleasures. The old scholar class made over as lush settings, plied with self-indulgent pleasures and languid time to savour them. A garden filled with every wonder or a landscape open to restful pilgrimage; idyllic solutions for having civilized pleasures and Natural elations. And are these not too a form of the unmet and fantastic longings that come along with the rubble and habits we've piled up in museums and poems?

 

Besides the charm of obsolete and antique gestures, one may also recognize that transforming things into symbols does not diminish other sensual and psychological experiences that they may give rise to. And if we take things only for their supposed cultural importance, we may find ourselves not only ignorant of potent joys but open to considerable satire. Beside Yu Peng's paintings one recalls the outrageous humour within the sacred images of French Romanesque sculpture, coincidentally also composed of packed space and flexible proportions.

 

To turn one's eyes through Yu Peng's painting is to undergo peculiar spatial circumstances, which one recognizes as a product of wide research (and Yu Peng sometimes hangs a late painting of Huang Pin-hung in this studio-cum-living room). But such research is applied with consequence, setting up not only spatial sensations, but favouring a range of emotional and intellectual understandings of these paintings and what they may represent in one's conceptualizing.

 

These paintings are like flowers and objects strewn among grass; a box turned over. Things and the space between them are formed of the same species of shapes, they let loose a reduplication of solid and open rhymes. The composition is closely formed, carefully and casually varied to effect subtle emotional differences (and in this there has been a development from the sometimes mechanical patterning of several years ago.)One moves from point to point, gently turning over and around each, then moving on. Some segments are wide places of expanding view, others veritable caves of compression. Each relates only incidentally to another, carried on by snatches of narrative direction, details acting as parentheses for others in aimless transformations. The hand-twisted neck of a tree elsewhere resembles a bird's body, a woman'shair, a rock, a potted flower-- the compositions could be endless, a wallpaper without repetition.

 

In considering these suggestive spatial moments, one may find the peculiar exhilaration of grasping and letting go. Firstly as it is felt in physical acts. And then conceptually,as when one becomes aware of the succession of ideas and emotions that arise and dissipate within us. And by this one may think toward the manner of perception described by Buddhists for a post-enlightenment return to “living in the would”. It might be described as an amalgam of a possible present dream and an impossible transcendent truth, or rather this may be transparent irony.

 

The compositions may also be felt as erratic rhythms of the sort one finds in Ming painting and classical qin music. This is difficult to describe adequately but might be compared to a measure of attentive time and the relative abruptness of the move from one brushstroke or bit of image to the next. It is a relatively thin rhythm, generally clear, and not composed of multiple layers (one is not so very tempted to find a multiplicity of spatial or structural possibility in the strokes as one might for instance in Huang Pin-hung or even Tseng Yuho).

 

Scale, however, remains dramatically open to our indecision, the wide and sketchy brushwork allowing us to take things as both large and small. Figures and the world they occupy are roughly matched but not entirely; much seems miniature and the sense of playing with a child's toys and or literati curios recurs. But this indecision welcomes the sensation of artifice, of awareness that, like an intellectual model, is at once complete for history and yet may be a self-delusion.

 

Brushwork delightfully becomes an object in itself, shattering representations. One may conclude that the awkward, deft strokes are but a gesture to defer a fetish of profession-alism. The self-conscious, ersatz primitive version of educated experience is very much Yu Peng's theatre. A theatre which he pursues in his personal life as well, forging an amateur's life from a few antiques and ordinary things, lacking in formal preparation but with an actor's regard for the taste and surfaces of literati experience, a pretence of disregard for the concrete and plastic and fumes of Taipei. Playing at knowledge beyond knowledge, his freely spun whimsies are perceptively insubstantial.

 

It would be dissatisfying to attempt to be excited by Yu Peng's work in the way that one might be stimulated by the visual pyrotechnics of electronic media or other drastic experiences. His work also fails to soothe through symbolic resolution of social meaning orthe projection of a lonely artist hero. There is a discomforting lack ofeither a reverent continuity of some idea of historical value, or a forceful critique of a misguided present. In comparison to works that are conduits of force and surety, painting as oblique as Yu Peng's virtually slips from view. Such openness and instability might be taken for immaturity, but an immaturity of this sort is too little respected in our effort to get beyond feeling ill at ease in the world.

 

Yu Peng's paintings may catalyse a wry, dandified reflection on the pursuit of culture perse. They can pass for a dream or a puppet theatre, containing whatever cosmic value is imputed to them only through their slightness. One may indulge them laughing and smiling, and yet even lapse into aspirations and complexity of mind.     

 

 

 

 

Eric Wear

                                                                               

 

 

October, 1992

Hong Kong