SHANGHAI, CHINA.- The Zhu Qizhan Art Museum presents Physical Practice: Chi Peng’s Solo Exhibition. Flying Astray by Leo Xu (deputy director of Curatorial Department, Zhu Qizhan Art Museum) - Is art world growing vertiginously too fast？With windfalls of opportunities, today’s fledgling artists are wooed and almost spoiled by scouts from the art industry. Having graduated for merely one year, Chi Peng has lined up with his lucky peers and made his way into a bunch of significant exhibitions, be they domestic or international. Yet, Chi’s already glorious resume cannot illustrate, sufficiently, his art if without a view of his work -- which of course deserves a visit.

The very first look at Chi Peng’s photographs will bring to mind the education background of the artist who must have obtained the insight into the lineage of Chinese contemporary art. Seemingly a graduate from the Chinese new photography school, Chi’s output is testimony to his mellowing approach. Running or leaping characters in his frames ring a bell to the performance art while shooting the performance is exactly the main recipe of Chinese new photography. His series Sprinting Forward (2003/04) bear a comic-styled storyline – the aggressive red aircrafts glide in a coyly sarcastic fashion, and the trotting and stumbling boys who appear innocent and naive act like fully engrossed in the play.

Evidently, Chi Peng’s visual world is built on digital technologies and softwares. The digital tech, a hype in the not too remote past, addressed the conceptual and in the meanwhile concerned the hi-tech. But now things are changed, the digital photo-collage has been adopted by netizens for online entertainment. Hence, the generalization of digital manipulation sort of overshadows the digital art, and most importantly, those artists who practice simple electronic scissors-and-paste are not likely to win over the enlightened public. In other words, the current digital-manipulated photography is more about the concept and skill. With a good intuition of composition, Chi knows a thing or two about balancing the elements within the frame. Judging from the digital image editing techniques, several of Chi’s compositions are, probably but not necessary, indebted to a handful of Germany photographers like Andreas Gursky in particular. Whereas the difference between the two lies in that the large format and new techniques used by the former allows a voyeuristic view into the ambiguity and voluptuousness of the city while the latter maps the informative social landscape. In terms of production, for those who cannot afford big budget and large crew as much as Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson can but still crave similar outcomes, the computer softwares come in handy, among which Photoshop ranks as the most economic and useful tool for post-production. And the good command of photoshop facilitates Chi to integrate distinct elements without any trace.

The red planes, human-shaped dragonflies in Chi’s early outputs went parallel to the humorous, thoughts-provoking effects of animation. His latest series I F*** Me are a body of laboriously fashioned works that look like sitcoms on paper – office, telephone booth, and toilet, didn’t these spots make the most typical scenes in the 1980s and 1990s sitcom? Back then in the 1970s, Cindy Sherman reproduced, with her lens, an array of pictures as if sliced out of the Hollywood films which agreed with the very DIY spirits. Since Sherman’s Untitled Film Still, cinematic plot has been favored among photographers and certain artists who make photo as well, that’s to say, to film a photo, or rather, freeze a decisive moment in the staged reality. Thanks to the ever more matured digital dark-room techniques, the making of photography runs abreast with filmmaking towards a hi-tech end. Also it is the digital advances that enable Chi to materialize his imaginary world where tens of Chi Peng are running in fields, human-looked dragonflies fluttering their wings, world-famous buildings juxtaposed in one view, and the like. But deep inside of this is artist’s unstated ambition. No matter Chi’s works or Sherman’s film stills, they both shared one thing -- regarding their approaches – they are the leading actors in their own plays.

Ego is in fact central to Chi’s photography, spanning most of his projects. When groups of Chi Peng, whether running or jumping, made his shy debut in Sprinting Forward, the ego was not magnified as much as in the later projects, but the dramatic scenes in his pictures echoed the paintings of a number of anime-inspired artists at the same time. In Chi’s follow-ups, he invented his later signature imagery – a winged Chi Peng. With these dragonflies flying around, the ego was then enhanced. For instance, Garden of Babylon captures a mystery, the artists lying undressed in bed with a semi-naked man behind the camera on the right, plus a troop of dragonflies fleeing away; the surreal and elusive story is therefore left to the interpretation of viewers themselves. Brimming with narcissism and excessive hormones, the two series of I F*** Me tried to come out on their own. Boys, eerie narrations, the burning youth, phantoms of one’s own image, those are the vocabularies a younger generation of artists have shared. Quite phenomenal.

A couple of years ago, Anthony Goicolea surfaced in the American art scenes. His work gives another story of youth -- wicked and bizarre -- in which artist himself played almost all the roles, resulting in an all-about-a-boy visual fiction. Between Chi Peng and Goicolea there is apparently a common ground: the depiction of ego refers to, on one hand, the artist’s self-portrait and to the male image on the other. Addressing love and affection through self-image has long been employed by male photographers. Probably since the infamous Stonewall Riot, the mannered romantic beauty in male photography has been ebbing away, and in its place have arrived some more social topics. Artists like Robert Mapplethorpe and Gilbert & George associated the male images and narcissism with youth subcultures. Their concerns about marginalized groups and explicit visual language sparked tremendous controversies in the societies. If without the proliferation of fashion magazines and advert campaigns in the following days, the male images would not have met up with such a huge demand from the market – and it is also such a demand that rendered the pictures more optimistic and delightful. This trend can be exemplified by artists, such as Pierre et Gilles and Wolfgang Tillmans, whose efforts reinterpreted the rainbow culture from a variety of levels, say, entertainment, lifestyle, love, consumerism, etc. In a sense, today’s artists, especially those like Chi Peng or Anthony Goicolea, they followed the same path Pierre et Gilles once led to. In the pre-digital era, the duo used brushes instead of computer for their staged photographs. Though they created different time and space on the paper, one thing remains unchanged, that is, the male/self image.

However, the youth subculture, in accordance with Chi Peng’s experience, lacks the diversity and barely meets much acceptance as it is supposed to, let alone the full spectrum of the rainbow. Chi’s hilarious youth stories reveal more of anxiety, confusion, and frustration than optimism. Even though his new work World appears to take consumer society, urban landscape and globalization as the gimmick, the photo itself still murmurs the secret – the neon-lit night view of an undistinguishable city epitomized where the artists has grown up and lived. Desires and needs symbolized by man-sized adverts and lightboxs together with previous works of Chi are pigeonholed into the picture.