Plum Blossoms Gallery is delighted to present Chinese contemporary artist Lu Peng’s first solo show in Hong Kong, which will feature an important collection of recent works on paper and canvas. Drawing inspiration from the Daoist classic Zhuangzi, Lu Peng has produced a series of works that provide rich and complex meditations on tradition and cultural identity in modern China.

Born in Beijing in 1967, Lu Peng rose to prominence in the early nineties as a member of the ‘Three Travel Weary Loafers’ group (formed with Wei Dong & Liang Changsheng). Appropriating imagery from both traditional and popular culture, he has over the years captured with clarity and precision the chaotic and bewildering transformations that have occurred following China’s meteoric rise as a ‘Socialist Market Economy’. As the critic Zhang Zhaohui notes: “Lu Peng’s paintings portray people stuck in cultural interstices – those who have lost touch with their own cultural base yet fail to identify with the contemporary alternative. Therefore the tones of the picture are edgy, the people dismayed and frightened, the symbols and images entwined and entangled […] He observes and records the era and its accompanying culturo-psychological schemata as an outsider with the attitude of a free and unfettered wanderer.”

Lu Peng's Biography

Zhang Zhaohui's essay: Free and Unfettered