Conventional Physiognomy

Peng Jian's solo exhibition Conventional Physiognomy (curator: Fan Baiding, interior designer: Shu Huai) will be held at Tianmuli Pop-up Gallery on June 4, 2022. This exhibition presents Peng Jian's representative work series, including paintings, installations, and videos.  It is a periodical review of the artist’s creative career with his reflections and expectations about current artistic thinking.

Physiognomy judges people's inner nature through external appearance, and its theoretical basis originates from the connection between natural order and individual life. In addition to assessing personality based on facial features, in a more general sense, physiognomy also means seeing inner characteristics through appearances, seeing the essence through phenomena.  Since a long time, Peng Jian's art has shown a way of exploration in the form of observation. Focusing on the everyday, he uses ordinary things in life as the medium to capture personal experience projected from nature. With the help of the traditional Chinese painting method of using ruler to draw straight lines, together with his subtle understanding of the language of brush and ink, Peng Jian attempts to reveal natural order and relation of forms behind lines and colours, through his observation and challenge of the standard and the conventional.