O2art will present a Special Exhibition for Winter Solstice, PENG Si's Individual Project "One Stroke at a Time: Approaches to Daily Work from 2017 to 2024" from December 21, 2024 to January 27, 2025.
This exhibition debuts a number of precious manuscript works by PENG Si between 2017 and 2024. The series includes material experiment and exploration, and imagery accumulation, and serves as a visual diary of PENG's recent approaches, faithfully preserving the traces of his “no-self” relationship with his private time after disappearing from public view in 2017. A distinctive feature of these his daily practice works like daily lessons is the white border on all his work, a choice that stems from PENG's understanding of traditional calligraphy and seal-cutting. Naturally, "blank space" is a subject that has long captivated PENG and similar blank boundaries have prevailed in many of his oil paintings.
The works in this exhibition are closely linked to PENG's portrait and landscape series but also independent from them. The close link lies in his numerous new attempts in materials and brushwork during the training of these manuscript works like daily lessons, allowing for a continuous enrichment of painting experience. The expansion of the painting dimensions has led to the emergence of his new portrait and landscape series later. Although he tries to abandon subjective ideas and understanding, the works still reveal what he has learned and experienced in the past, and the images demonstrate a regular sequential pattern, a rational illustration naturally formed based on his accumulation of thoughts.
The independent aspect is that this series of practices presents PENG's quiet "no-self" state rather than being expressive. "Only when I am deeply rooted in a single stroke can memory and expectation be reached." He applies the "observation of thoughts" in Zen meditation to each stroke in the daily practice like daily lessons and strives to reach a realm that was previously difficult to attain at the art creation level. During the practice process, he abandons his previous fixed ideas about art and painting, discovers new materials in daily life, does not set the final appearance of the images, but trusts the feelings at the moment when his body makes contact with the medium, returns to the original relationship between the hand, the pen and the paper in painting, stroke by stroke, over the years.
A single stroke, with the simplest of movements, connects all the motives of PENG's paintings. It represents the certainty in daily life, the origin of painting, and the answer to the pictures.
