Peng Zuqiang

Peng Zuqiang

Cold Compress

The exhibition Cold Compress consists of the single-channel work Sight Leak, and the five-channel work Keep in Touch. In Sight Leak, Roland Barthes’s text runs through the work’s texture; the artist casually mentions the mobility of class intersperses, correlates and compares fragments of contemporary life and collective memory. In Keep in Touch, the artist’s narration has an elegant demeanour. As time passing, previous events have been transformed into emotions. This elegant narration organizes new nodes, like the beginning or the end of a novel—everything is settled, and everything has just begun. This may echo Jorge Luis Borges’s statement, “Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms.”

In these two works, the artist’s personalized narrative makes the distance between himself and the work ambiguous. While trying to interpret the complexities of contact and connection, he documented these emotions soundly with his mastery of the medium. When we take a closer look at the tight connection, we may get a similar experience to the cold compress mentioned in the video.

A cold compress usually serves as the first process of treatment. For people who have not applied cold compress before, even in the presence of an injury, cold compress seem to be more worrisome: the fear of temperature stimulation, the fear of the hurt that may accompany the healing. Once the cold compress is applied, the original timidity will be relieved because the pain in the body will be alleviated: the tension will be eliminated, and our mood will be soothed. Just follow the PRICE Protocol: Protection, Rest, Ice, Compression, and Elevation, and everyone can safely handle minor injuries at home. As humans strategically reduce pain, swelling and inflammation by scientific standards, the subsequent development of total trust and reliance on cold compress is well grounded.

Mercifully, with cold compress, the swelling is suppressed, the soreness is dissolved, and even though we cannot avoid our daily injuries, we will eventually be healed. This process is like sneaking under the glimmering surface of the works in the exhibition and being surrounded by “cold compress” and other things:

If you call that cushion, then there are cushions everywhere.

If you call that down feather, then there are down feathers everywhere.

But it is a freedom

that dissolves in water.

It is something better—love.

Feel free to jump on it or snatch it.

No matter how hard you try, you can’t make a dent in love.

Excerpted from Primeval Chaos, by Kanoko Okamoto

Sun Wenjie
ARTIST: Peng Zuqiang

Peng Zuqiang (b. 1992, Changsha, Hunan Province) graduated from the Goldsmiths and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Peng makes video, film and installation, with an attention to the affective qualities within histories, bodies, and language, approximating meanings through associations and coincidences. Recent residencies include IAS CEU, Budapest (2022); Organhaus, Chongqing (2021); Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Maine (2019); The Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2017-2019). He was awarded the Jury Special Award at the 8th Huayu Youth Award 2020, and a ‘Special Mentions’ at the Festival Film Dokumenter in Yogyakarta, Indonesia with his first feature film, Nan (2020) . He currently lives and works in Amsterdam.

Selected solo and group exhibitions include: “Sideways Looking”, Cell Project Space, London, UK (2022), “Hesitations”, ANTENNA-TENNA, Shanghai, China (2021), “In Solidarity with ______?”, OCAT Shanghai, China (2022), “The Elephant Escaped”, Macalline Art Center, Beijing, China (2022), “One song is like another, and the boat is always from afar”, Times Museum, Guangzhou, China (2021), “Más allá el mar canta”, Times Art Center, Berlin, Germany (2021), “A Slight Shift of Angle”, aashra, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, Lebanon (2021), “Right of Return - Deluge Contemporary Art”, Victoria, Canada (2021).
CURATOR: Sun Wenjie

Born in 1989 in Dalian, lives and works in Beijing. She is a curator and writer. Sun studied at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), and later at the Goldsmiths College, University of London, where she received her MFA in Curating. Sun joined the Red Brick Art Museum in 2016 and has held the position of Head of Exhibitions at the Museum since 2017. The exhibitions she curated solely and jointly include: The Long Way Around, ShanghART, Beijing (2021-2022); Call and Response: Judy Chicago x Stanley Whitney, Longlati Foundation, Shanghai (2020); Escape Routes - Bangkok Art Biennale, Bangkok, Thailand (2020); Chen Zihao: 2.5 D, Tang Contemporary Art, Bangkok, Thailand (2019); Andres Serrano: An American Perspective, Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing (2017); Wen Pulin Archive of Chinese Avant-garde Art of the 80s and 90s, Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing (2016); Re-coding, CAFA International, Beijing (2016); An Exhibition on Exhibiting, CAFA Art Museum, Beijing (2011), etc.
Peng Zuqiang, Sight Leak, 2022. Single-channel video, 12’15” (black & white, sound), looping, dimension variable. Courtesy of the artist and Antenna Space.
Peng Zuqiang, Sight Leak, 2022. Single-channel video, 12’15” (black & white, sound), looping, dimension variable. Courtesy of the artist and Antenna Space.
Peng Zuqiang, Sight Leak, 2022. Single-channel video, 12’15” (black & white, sound), looping, dimension variable. Courtesy of the artist and Antenna Space.
Peng Zuqiang, Keep in Touch, 2021. 5-channel video installation, 13'58'', dimension variable. Courtesy of the artist and Antenna Space.
Peng Zuqiang, Keep in Touch, 2021. 5-channel video installation, 13'58'', dimension variable. Courtesy of the artist and Antenna Space.
Peng Zuqiang, Keep in Touch, 2021. 5-channel video installation, 13'58'', dimension variable. Courtesy of the artist and Antenna Space.
Peng Zuqiang, Keep in Touch, 2021. 5-channel video installation, 13'58'', dimension variable. Courtesy of the artist and Antenna Space.
Peng Zuqiang, Keep in Touch, 2021. 5-channel video installation, 13'58'', dimension variable. Courtesy of the artist and Antenna Space.