Exeter, NH (March 29, 2007)—From Monday, April 2 to Saturday, May 19, the Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy will present “China Past/Present,” photographs featuring works by Sze Tsung Leong, Chi Peng and Chen Lingyang. All works are courtesy of Phillips Exeter Academy alumnus Andrew E. Lewin ’77. An opening reception will be held on Friday, April 6, from 6:30–8:00 p.m. The Lamont Gallery is located in the Frederick R. Mayer Art Center on Tan Lane. The exhibit is free and open to the public.
Sze Tsung Leong is a photographer and painter of American and British descent based in New York. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the High Museum of Art in Atlanta; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the International Center of Photography in New York; and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California, among others. In 2006, 22 pieces from his “History Images” series were shown as one of four monographic exhibitions at the High Museum of Art. His work has also been shown in exhibitions including: “Landscape: Recent Acquisitions” at MoMA, the 2006 Havana Biennial, the 2004 Taipei Biennial; “Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China” at the International Center of Photography and the Asia Society; and “Painting as Paradox” at Artists Space. In 2005, he received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the Eisner Prize in photography from the University of California at Berkeley in 1993. History Images, his first monograph, was published by Steidl in 2006. His work is represented by Yossi Milo Gallery in New York.
New York Times critic Roberta Smith refers to Leong’s “History Images” series as, “…beautiful, frightening and sad. Taken in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and elsewhere, they mostly offer detailed views of the new, vanquishing not only the old, but also any sense of human scale.” Leong describes the large-scale photographs in this series as being, “…in the form of cities in China, either being destroyed or created at this juncture in time. They are of past histories, in the form of traditional buildings and neighborhoods, urban fabrics, and natural landscapes, in the process of being erased. They are of the absence of histories, in the form of construction sites, built upon an erasure of the past so complete that one would never know a past had ever existed. And they are of the anticipation of future histories, yet to unfold, in the form of newly built cities.”
Chi Peng is part of the wave of talented photographers coming out of China in recent years. Born in the Shandong Province in 1981, he graduated from the Digital Media Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where he lives and works.
In the June–July 2004 issue of Art in America, critic Eleanor Heartney writes about Peng’s work in the exhibition “One to One: Visions—Recent Photographs from China,” featuring works by eight young Chinese photographers. Heartney states that “… the show offered an intriguing cross-section of thematic and stylistic approaches to life in contemporary China. Almost as illuminating as what was included is the kind of imagery that was absent: there were no evocations of the beauty of the Chinese countryside familiar from traditional landscape art, no conventional portraits and no references to the once all-powerful family structure. Instead, the artists depict young people, crowds and moments of private fantasy.” Heartney goes on to write, “One wonders whether a discomfort at this state of constant surveillance lies behind Chi Peng’s fantasies of rebellion and indolence. Two photographs by him present images of naked young men running down a street or an institutional corridor, pursued by red model airplanes. Others show a pair of young men, their faces weirdly painted, toying with liquid-filled beakers and sitting down to a repast of blue-painted goose.” Peng’s large-scale, Sprinting Forward 2 will be included in “China Past/Present.” Peng has exhibited his photographs throughout China, as well as in the United States, Germany, Japan, Australia and Denmark. His work is represented by Chambers Fine Art in New York.
Chen Lingyang works mainly with installation art and photography, and her works usually explore the beauty of female bodies and their intrinsic meanings. Her image in this exhibition is a large-scale, rear-illuminated transparency, with the artist inserted into a cityscape.
The artist writes the following about the piece, 5:00 No. 2: “This giantess is not really very brave, and so she will only freely change her size and make these kinds of gestures when the clock strikes 25:00. Very often, the real world and the male world get mixed up in my mind. Facing these two worlds, I often feel that I am weak and helpless, and don’t know what to do. But just being alive means that I cannot avoid them, not even for one day. I wish that every day there could be a certain time like 25:00, when I could become as large as I like, and do whatever I want.” Lingyang was born in the Zhejiang Province in 1975, and studied in the Affiliated High School of China Academy of Art, Hangzhou; and Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. She now lives and works in Beijing.
Gallery hours are Monday 1–5 p.m., Tuesday–Saturday 9 a.m.–5 p.m., closed on Sunday. For further information, contact the Lamont Gallery at (603) 777-3461. For directions to Phillips Exeter Academy, call (603) 777-4330. A complete list of upcoming events is available on the Phillips Exeter Academy public events line at (603) 777-4309 and on our website at www.exeter.edu.
Phillips Exeter Academy is a coeducational, independent preparatory school that was founded in 1781 and originated the system of instruction known as Harkness teaching in 1931. In the spirit of its charter to foster both goodness and knowledge, students come from a wide variety of geographic, economic, racial and religious backgrounds. The diverse student body comes from approximately 45 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, The Virgin Islands and 26 foreign countries.