The Land of Abundance - Tunnel of Time and Space
He Pengqi
贺鹏琪
Production date
2011
Object Detail
Media
pencil on paper
Measurements
21 x 21 cm
Notes
Searching through piles of rubbish and recycling, He Pengqi looks for interesting timber objects; he collects old cupboard doors, wooden boxes, and other weathered things that reveal the passage of time on their scarred surfaces. These become the canvases for strange, dreamlike paintings that blend imagery drawn from Chinese folk tales, history, memory and imagination. Training in the Mural Painting Department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts provided He Pengqi with a rigorous academic grounding in representational painting, and access to a style and method inflected by traditions of French and Russian figuration, modernist painting, and Soviet Socialist Realism. He emerged with a command of painterly technique and superb draftsmanship that allow him to create mysterious works, conveying ideas about society and the individual in elliptically ambiguous ways.
A highly personal symbolic language is evident in all He Pengqi’s works, both in painting and drawing. Imagery of clouds, leafless trees, and the perspectival illusionism of checkered tiled floors recall Magritte, Delvaux and Ernst. Mysterious doors open under the sea, fish swim in the air inside empty rooms, and rocks fall from the sky. Empty doorways, oceans and straight roads leading to far horizons recur. In The Land of Abundance series (2011) highly detailed fine pencil drawings represent bleak, surreal landscapes that fuse the modern word with the world of Chinese folk tales and legends. The Land of Abundance—Decadence I depicts an empty road leading through bleak, fallow fields to the horizon; the sky is filled with falling meteors. In The Land of Abundance—The Fun Fair a twisting fairground slide emerges from puffy clouds. The Land of Abundance—The Sea shows a parched, cracked expanse of dry mud stretching as far as the eye can see. Propped on a rock is a painting of a lighthouse, on a cuboid block; other cubes depicting ships, seagulls and ocean waves, some impossibly floating in the air, cast shadows on the mud below. He Pengqi says he was remembering the traditional tales and fables of his childhood. If these are fairytale landscapes, the moral of these tales is bleak.
A highly personal symbolic language is evident in all He Pengqi’s works, both in painting and drawing. Imagery of clouds, leafless trees, and the perspectival illusionism of checkered tiled floors recall Magritte, Delvaux and Ernst. Mysterious doors open under the sea, fish swim in the air inside empty rooms, and rocks fall from the sky. Empty doorways, oceans and straight roads leading to far horizons recur. In The Land of Abundance series (2011) highly detailed fine pencil drawings represent bleak, surreal landscapes that fuse the modern word with the world of Chinese folk tales and legends. The Land of Abundance—Decadence I depicts an empty road leading through bleak, fallow fields to the horizon; the sky is filled with falling meteors. In The Land of Abundance—The Fun Fair a twisting fairground slide emerges from puffy clouds. The Land of Abundance—The Sea shows a parched, cracked expanse of dry mud stretching as far as the eye can see. Propped on a rock is a painting of a lighthouse, on a cuboid block; other cubes depicting ships, seagulls and ocean waves, some impossibly floating in the air, cast shadows on the mud below. He Pengqi says he was remembering the traditional tales and fables of his childhood. If these are fairytale landscapes, the moral of these tales is bleak.
Accession number
2015.241