Peng Gang (Grant Peng)

Grant Peng was born in northern China. His adolescence coincided with the Chinese Cultural Revolution. He never went to middle school or high school – Mao Zedong shut down the entire country’s education system. Instead, fascinated by Western art, Peng taught himself to paint. Works by Monet and Modigliani stood in start relief to the government sanctioned, pro-Communist Chinese and Russian paintings he had grown up seeing. He painted obsessively. By the 1970s, he was running with a wild group of young poets, painters, and political activists in Beijing. Together they held underground, politically dangerous exhibition, the first of their kind in Beijing. “We were united by the conviction that art could be more than propaganda”.

Art has always been intertwined with social and political conditions and artists are, by their nature, confronted with contemporary realities. For a give subject, I try to achieve an artistic understanding of its physical and social meaning while using the canvas to capture its inherent beauty. I strive now, as I did half a century ago in Maoist China, to reflect social and political phenomena in painting.