Entre terre et ciel

From the Urban Rhythms to the 3000 realms in a single moment of life, Peng Yong began to experiment with simpler brushstrokes to express complex emotions, which for him required a meditative focus. This shift reinforces the artist's experience in approaching the process of creating art rather than the outcome. As the artist puts it, his work over the past few years has begun to move away from looking outwards and back towards himself, a process of refinement that has seen him gradually establish a 'territory' of his own. After this, he began to experiment with the harnessing of his mind through creation, which required him to escape from his original subject, to establish new connections with the world beyond the 'territory ' and to open up the possibilities of life. As a turning point in the ongoing process of creation, the 'territory' is broken and the nature of things is revealed. As Gilles Deleuze says, the territoriality is the evidence of the existence of a plane or space, the basis for repetition and generation.

It is easy to see a glimpse of this in traditional Chinese aesthetics, such as the idea of ‘Archaism’ in Yuan dynasty painting, where the expression of ancient ideas was no longer a method of painting practice, but an ability to express oneself, an imitation that was not an exact copy or replication, but a creative imitation, like in calligraphy, through the ‘rules’ set by the ancients. Peng Yong, on the other hand, has purified this 'rule', and the repetition of seemingly simple and clear blocks of colour is a replication of the creative experience. German sinologist Ledderose has always pointed out that traditional Chinese art is passed on in a repetitive and modular way, with the artist as a generative machine rather than the centre of everything. This seems to contradict the idea that Chinese art can only to be sensed not explained, but a person who can generate is not a singular, but a plural, with countless possibilities to create new forms, and we live in a world that is constantly generating the 'many of one'. Peng Yong's work reconciles these two ideas at the same time.

We live in a world that is going through a cycle of building, breaking, creating and rebuilding. We often falsely assume that there is a real world hidden behind this cycle, when in fact all existence is but a relatively stable moment. ‘Territories’ are these relatively stable moments, and Peng Yong's works help us to access the existential value and meaning of various ‘existences’ in the context of this dynamic view of generation.