Nan Ke Gallery is pleased to present the solo exhibition Nostalgia by artist Peng Zhang from September 29 to November 10. Like mountain winds carrying seeds and burrs from afar through the towering structures of the metropolis, the forces and beauty of the wild rural landscape grow freely within this urban space.
Peng Zhang, who lives between the Netherlands and China, focuses his exploration on land art. His creative roots lie in the memories of rural life in his hometown, drawing from his upbringing beneath the vast skies. He transforms his experiences and perceptions of the land into artistic nourishment, which flows and takes root in different places.
Installation view at De Scheffer, 2021, © Courtesy to the artist Photo credit to Bram Vreugdenhil
During his time living and exploring in the Netherlands, Peng has experienced the constant tension and interplay between the urban art context and the deeply grounded connection to the wet earth. He describes this process of migration and integration in foreign environments as “Root into new land.” It is a kind of internal conflict that he, as a rural Chinese artist, has continually faced. The seeds of the mountains find a way to flourish in foreign soil: from 2021 to 2023, he participated the residency of Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in 2024, Peng received sponsorship from the Mondriaan Fund and was nominated for the De Scheffer Prijs.
Peng Zhang
Villagers in Memory, 2021
Xanthiums
12h x 28w x 38d cm/Each
© Courtesy of the artist
In the exhibition, the large-scale installation Villagers in Memory methodically occupies the modern architectural space, narrating the artist's deep nostalgia for the countryside and the land. During the creation process, Peng sets up his "studio" in the fields, continuing the traditions of agricultural civilization by working in a kneeling posture close to the ground. In this work, burrs are meticulously shaped into sharp-edged cubes, intertwined like the close-knit relationships in rural communities; yet, at the same time, they stand independently, calmly and orderly in their arrangement.
Peng Zhang
Weaving Memories, 2021
Rice straws, bamboo sticks
Dimensions variable
© Courtesy of the artist
Production process of Weaving Memories © Courtesy to the artist
Another installation, Weaving Memories, reflects a softer side of village life. Coarse knitting needles naturally weave rice straw and bamboo fibers together, binding the yin and yang elements of small-scale farming. In the urban context, the delicate threads of nostalgia for the land and village are woven and reorganized, becoming a more adaptable creation that can be carried intimately as one moves between broader and narrower worlds.
Installation view at Rijksacademie, 2021-2023, © Courtesy to the artist Photo credit to Sander Van Wettum
The paintings exhibited continue Peng's intimate, naive, and unpretentious visual language. Works such as Rural Scenes-Sun and Moon, Circus, Solo Dance, and Purple Rain stand throughout the exhibition space, using the gentle texture of watercolors to outline and blur fragments of memories collected from the earth and carefully preserved.
Installation view at Rijksakademie Openstudio, 2023, © Courtesy to the artist Photo credit to Sander van Wettum
Raindrops, leaves, animal bodies, and human silhouettes appear as distinct as images in ancient Chinese poetry, much like the evocative words of Yuan verse: "withered vine, old trees, crows at dusk." These separate images evoke collective memory, knitting together into a shared visual landscape. However, Peng does not seek to explore collective consciousness. In the contemporary city, where steel thorns grow unchecked, the countryside and the land have instead become part of the “unconscious,” an embedded longing deeply intertwined within one's genetic code.
Peng Zhang
Solo Dance, 2022
Watercolor, ink, pencil on rice paper
140h x 70w cm
© Courtesy of the artist
In Peng’s work, “memory” seems to be a persistent element. Memory is both revered, reduced to a simplified stamp-like impression, and yet elusive, constantly being unraveled and extended, forming a connection that is hard to articulate. Within the exhibition space, this nostalgia carries a subtle sorrow, growing wildly and fiercely across walls both inner and outer, leading viewers back to the imagined moonlit night where one’s origin was born. As Hermann Hesse once described:
Peng Zhang
Purple Rain, 2022
Watercolor, ink, pencil on rice paper
70h x 140w cm
© Courtesy of the artist
"They no longer sought to find the essence of things. They no longer pursued a goal beyond the world of appearances… The world is so beautiful: the circle of the moon and stars at night is beautiful, the brook, the beach, the forest and rocks, the goat and beetle, flowers and butterflies are all beautiful."
Text by Roxane Fu
