Enchanting Surfaces: Objects, Gender, and Ink Painting

A conversation with Peng Wei

Wednesday, April 2, 2025

38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall

gallery@bgc.bard.edu

$15 General | $12 Seniors | Free for people associated with a college or university, people with museum ID, people with disabilities and caregivers, and BGC members

Join us for a special evening with the internationally renowned artist Peng Wei, whose artworks explore the delicate, fantastic world of dreams, memories, desire, and feminine experience through a unique approach to traditional Chinese ink painting and calligraphy. At this event, Peng Wei will show some of her works and discuss how she engages objects while contemplating their materiality and the possibilities of a time-honored painting medium. The event will be moderated by Bard Graduate Center assistant professor Mei Mei Rado, with a conversation loosely structured around three themes—painting the skin, ink painting as a total work of art, and narrating dreams.

A Dress and Textile History Conversation.

Currently living in Beijing, Peng Wei is an internationally celebrated artist who explores the methods of traditional Chinese ink painting to conjure extraordinary realities by layering personal narratives across time, geographies, and cultures. Her work interrogates cultural memories, intellectual belonging, and issues of gender and sexuality, transcending the boundaries between the past and present, and East and West. Since launching her artistic career with the Stone series in 2000, she has created numerous series, including Robe, Good Things Come in Pairs, Letters from a Distance, Seven Nights, Hi-Ne-Ni, We All Need Stories, and so on, which are executed across different mediums, such as painting, installation, video, and photography. Peng Wei has held solo exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Suzhou Museum, the National Museum of History (Taipei), the Changsha Art Museum, among other venues, in addition to participating in numerous group exhibitions in museums and art fairs around the world. Her artworks have been collected by institutions such as the Princeton University Art Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the National Art Museum of China, and the M+ Museum (Hong Kong).

Image: Peng Wei, Hi-Ne-Ni X, 2019. Ink on flax paper, painting installation.