On Set | Artist: Peng Xia

 

In the exhibition On Set, artist Peng Xia unfolds painting as a language that oscillates between reality and fiction, narrative and abstraction. His works navigate the tension between complexity and simplicity, echoing the Chinese aesthetic philosophy of “finding simplicity within complexity.” Through a visual vocabulary of fragmentation and blurring, Xia transforms painting into an inquiry into experience, memory, and perception itself.

 

140h x 100w cm

©Courtesy of the artist

 

As an active figure between China and Germany, Peng Xia has garnered increasing recognition in the international art scene. He has held significant solo exhibitions in Berlin, Beijing, Kassel, Wiesbaden, and Krefeld, and has participated in major group exhibitions across Europe and China, including at Migrant Bird Space, Kunstraum Nürnberg, and Space Station in Beijing’s 798 Art District. His practice has been acknowledged with several awards and grants, such as the 2022 Studio Grant from Kunstraum Nürnberg, the 2015 Studio Grant from Migrant Birds Projects, and the Printmaking Competition Prize at the Leipzig Book Fair in 2013. He was also nominated for both the Darmstädter Sezession Prize for Young Artists and the Heise Art Prize in 2013. These achievements underscore his academic significance and reinforce his position as a unique cross-cultural practitioner in the field of contemporary art.

 

 

 Installation view of On Set, August 2, 2025 - Sept 14, 2025, Nan Ke Gallery, Shanghai ©  Courtesy of Nan Ke Gallery.

 

Between 2015 and 2021, Xia deliberately sought to minimize subjective narratives in his work, instead focusing on subtle visual experiments. Using muted tones, blurred imagery, and fragmented forms, he created what could be described as a “monochrome theater,” where image and time are folded into one another, evoking the lingering traces of history. These works carry a quiet, almost spectral resonance that destabilizes the boundary between reality and transcendence.

 

In his most recent series, Diversität, Xia introduces surreal and imaginative elements, constructing a pictorial space that hovers between realism and magical realism. Faded scrolls, veiled curtains, and broken fragments populate his canvases, appearing both as remnants swept up by the flood of contemporary information and as spectral echoes summoned from the continuum of history. His interrogation of “the real” imbues the work with a poetic tension, balanced between skepticism and intimacy, silence and unease.

 

 

Installation view of On Set, August 2, 2025 - Sept 14, 2025, Nan Ke Gallery, Shanghai ©Courtesy of Nan Ke Gallery.

 

For Peng Xia, painting is never a static image but a persistent inquiry into the conditions of experience and existence. Beginning with fragments of individual memory, he absorbs images and phenomena from everyday encounters and reconstitutes them into painterly “sets.” In this way, his work not only responds to the excesses of contemporary image culture but also reopens the dialogue between form, concept, and art history.