Zhang Peng

Zhang Peng ist ein 1981 in Shandong, China geborener Künstler, der jetzt in Peking lebt und arbeitet. Seine Karriere hat er als Maler begonnen und entdeckte dann 2006 auch die Fotografie für sich.

Seine Werke sind allesamt ziemlich verstörend und furchteinflößend. Zhang Peng erklärt dies so:

In a broad sense, all of my works demon­strate a kind of oppres­sion. If con­di­tions allow, par­ents plan a future that they think will be good for their chil­dren. If they are not wealthy enough, they hope their chil­dren will have a skill and then they force them to develop it. As chil­dren grow up, their char­ac­ter is dis­torted by the inap­pro­pri­ate pres­sure of their par­ents and their school. The appear­ances of my fig­ures drift between real peo­ple and dolls. While the image is aes­thetic, I also want to rein­force the strong sense of dis­tor­tion.

We were sim­ple and pure when we were young. There was no com­pe­ti­tion at that time and peo­ple earned the same amount of money and were friendly to each other. How­ever, this is not the case any­more. Rela­tion­ships are frozen behind count­less sky­scrap­ers. The sit­u­a­tion of the past is more ideal to me. It is a shame that the val­ues of the past are long gone and money is now influ­enc­ing every­one.

Seine Vorgehensweise beim Erschaffen seiner Werke schildert Zhang Peng am besten selbst:

I stud­ied paint­ing for many years and I have a good sense of color and struc­ture. My girl­friend who stud­ied film has given me a lot of advice as well. In my work, I often inte­grate the tech­niques of paint­ing, film and pho­tog­ra­phy. I mod­i­fied the eyes of the girls so that I could get the facial pro­por­tions I want. At the same time, it sub­tly implies the infil­tra­tion of plas­tic surgery. Many beau­ti­ful things you see are not that real any­more. What lies beneath the beauty and mag­nif­i­cence is end­less pain that no one ever knows.

Noch mehr seiner faszinierenden Bilder finden sich auf seiner Internetseite oder auch bei ArtNet. Die Quelle der Zitate des Künstlers ist hier zu finden.

(via SweetStation)