Chi Peng

Born in 1981 in Yantai, Shandong Province, China, Chi Peng enrolled in the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in 2001 and began his artistic journey in 2003. In 2004, while still in college, his work was featured in the group exhibition One to One: Visions—Recent Photographs from China at the Chambers of Fine Art in New York, USA. Curated by renowned Chinese contemporary art curator Feng Boyi, this exhibition marked Chi Peng’s debut on the international art scene. In 2011, at just 29 years old, Chi Peng held his first major solo exhibition, Me, Myself, and I: Photoworks 2003-2010, at the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands. Spanning 1,200 square meters and showcasing 48 works, this exhibition was a significant milestone in his career. It was the second large-scale solo exhibition of a Chinese artist at the museum, following Weiwei Ai, and it was particularly remarkable as Chi Peng was still under 30 but already making significant strides in the art world. To date, he has created over 60 individual works, held more than 40 solo exhibitions, and participated in over 100 group exhibitions across 20 countries and regions. His works are housed in numerous art museums globally, with more than 60 of them becoming part of museum collections. Today, Chi Peng is recognized as a professional artist. Between 2012 and 2018, Chi Peng taught at the School of Design at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, where he focused on children's innovative thinking, creativity methods, and foundational courses. During this time, he also began exploring filmmaking and painting. From 2019 to 2021, he completed his first feature film, As Water in Water. The young artist Chi Peng is becoming increasingly well-known in his native China for his provocative, many a times in-your-face photographs. He takes images of public spaces, urban spaces, and inserts his body, oftentimes stark naked, into them. In his photographs, the images of himself are always that of the body in motion. ‘He’ always seems to be running away from the camera, or the viewer. There is a sense of urgency that permeates his work. The hyper-realistic mode Chi Peng’s photographs highlight the rapid pace of the changing social scene. It is almost as if he puts ‘himself’ in his photographs as a manifestation of the speed of change that even he cannot keep up with.