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Thursday, May 07, 2009
the qi peng dynasty (we are duchampions) at envoy enterprises
alexis granwell panel 1 (2009), ink on paper, 8.5” x 11" by qi peng
envoy enterprises is currently preparing for an exhibit involving the work of conceptual artist qi peng. The exhibit, titled the qi peng dynasty (we are duchampions), will involve a complex installation featuring a hybrid fusion between traditional works on paper and painting and cutting-edge new media art. The installation has been described as being based on the idea of autobiography loosely based on James Joyce’s novel “A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man” smashed with Facebook and Xerox.
qi peng combines selected “interview portraits,” which he has published through www.examiner.com as an online art project, between art professionals which he has met in real life or Facebook or Twitter or other social networking websites into a larger installation project. By delivering a cross section of the international art world, focusing on New York City and Los Angeles mostly with a small dose of his current hometown of Salt Lake City, the artist attempts to democratize how the public perceives any particular individual within this complex web of artists, art dealers, museum curators, art workers, and “slaves” who comprise this whole system of people who put together contemporary art for the audience. By displaying offset prints of these portraits like a digital version of August Sander photographs, peng attempts to humanize the art world as an antithesis to the glossy art market and blue chip players portrayed by the magazines.
edward winkleman panel 2 (2009), ink on paper, 8.5” x 11" by qi peng
This installation piece will present secondary documents that will reflect on how the artist’s first solo show in New York City became extant at envoy enterprises. Mixing together proposals, acceptance and rejection letters, critiques, as well some surprising documents that feature a Chelsea gallery, and a painting that is based on a prominent Brooklyn artist with overtones of the idea of “WWPD,” this work becomes a brave exploration of the politics of how exhibitions are created and galleries are curated.
This is a fairly dispassionate view of the artist’s subjective journey from a virtually unknown artist as a displaced New Yorker located in Utah into a slowly emerging artist as a small player within the international art world. He also highlights the challenges of an atypical Utah conceptual artist attaining both “critical affirmation” and “artistic defiance” with and against the somewhat insular New York contemporary art world reframed as the Garden of Eden.
qi peng states that there will be a surprise ending to the whole installation and a possible inclusion of the following events: an artist book signing at a table, an unexpected appearance of the Zero Dollar project by Laura Gilbert, a performance duel between Rick Herron and the artist himself, and guest appearances by famed bootlegger Eric Doeringer and collaborating artists William Powhida and Jennifer Dalton.
william powhida panel 1 (2009), ink on paper, 8.5” x 11" by qi peng
“the qi peng dynasty (we are duchampions)” is qi peng’s first solo exhibit in New York City. qi peng was born in 1976 in Queens, New York City. He lives and works mostly in Salt Lake City and sometimes in New York. His work has been exhibited at The Lab at Belmar, Anna Kustera, James Cohen/NURTUREART, Metro Pictures/Visual AIDS, modern8 gallery, and Projects Gallery. Currently he is represented by The Barbara Ann Levy Gallery in West Palm Beach, Florida.
envoy enterprises is a contemporary art space dedicated to the generation, presentation and promotion of contemporary visual arts practice. envoy enterprises' dynamic program of exhibitions, performances, concerts, artists' talks, publications, video and movie screenings, aims to provide opportunities for artists to exhibit their work within a context of current national and international practice. For more information visit, www.envoyenterprises.com
qi peng was born in Queens, New York in 1976 and received his masters degree at Yale University. He is a conceptual artist who executes “interviews” as a form of collaborative portraits with various art professionals and also uses primary/secondary documents to examine the contemporary art market. Occasionally he does paintings, photographs, and works on paper. The artist’s studio is located near downtown Salt Lake City and he works sometimes in New York City for street art or fine art special projects.
He has been exhibited in various places including the Projects Gallery, The Lab at Belmar, modern8 Gallery, James Cohan Gallery/NURTUREart, Metro Pictures, Art Raw Gallery, and Anna Kustera. qi peng is currently represented by The Barbara Ann Levy Gallery based out of West Palm Beach, Florida (www.balgallery.com). qi peng will have his first solo show at Envoy Gallery located in Lower East Side, New York City during June 2009.
"untitled collaborative piece" by David B. Smith and qi peng. Courtesy of David B. Smith and qi peng / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York.
Brian Sherwin: Concerning the directions you have taken with your art-- do you see yourself following a specific path? For example, do you still find time to paint while working on these other projects? Or would you say that you have found your ‘calling’, for lack of a better word?
qi peng: Oh yes, I still paint even with all of the work in the conceptual art stuff. The workload is pretty bad now so I may have to consider getting some assistants to help out especially in my work just like the studio system of the Renaissance era which wasn't such as a bad thing. Who knows whether Rubens could have been a conceptual artist with his official signature on the work of others? (laughs)
Painting is not dead, for me, as far as I am concerned. It's a daily or weekly exercise and an emotional testament to the resiliency of any artist. It even helps out with the conceptual art because even traditional painting or draftsmanship is the hallmark of what thoughts have solid construction and which ones have a foundation built on sand. I doubt that I could ever give up the brush and canvas or wood panel in my lifetime. Too much into my bloodstream.
Even with the new media art and video art being paramount within our media-laden culture, I seriously do believe that we need the primacy of good composition of our personal imagery. It's a matter of which tools that we choose to engineer the final artwork accordingly.
Even these interview portraits are a form of painting. Just that they are mixed media with photographic evidence and verbal phrases instead of acrylic and oil. That is painting in the loosest sense of the term. Or so we will think of it as such.
Brian Sherwin: You have exhibited at Projects Gallery, James Cohan Gallery, Art Raw Gallery and a number of other spaces. What do you enjoy most about exhibiting in general? Do you desire for viewers to be participants, so to speak, or do you view exhibiting as a way to gain feedback? Perhaps both?
qi peng: Exhibitions for me, is a form of public understanding and sharing of whatever projects I have done. A lot of my work has been shown at benefit art shows such as the coordination between NURTUREart and James Cohan or the Visual Aids and Metro Pictures. The artworks were sold for a good cause and for me, that is very important to remain socially engaged, as Sartre would have put it.
The interview portraits, none of which have been exhibited yet, are one layer of participation between the art world professional as well as myself and then with the public exhibition of them, a secondary layer of participation with the viewer is added to the pieces' meaning. I have received a lot of good feedback mostly online, particularly through the myartspace interface and email.
I am always glad when viewers are active participants within the public displays of art. I remember the huge impact that the Oldenburg metal sculpture of a clothespin in Philadelphia had on my daily routine of travel near Market Street. It was a reminder to take life in slowly and to realize that the visual cues surrounding us should not be ignored. Perhaps I have taken the dictum that life and art cannot be distinguished one step further as I have considered exhibiting private documents such as contracts or legal deeds as potential materials for the causal gallery visitor or museum fanatic to look at.
It's pretty much similar to pop art which takes the everyday and using its alchemy to transform that mundane object into something that has a special charm. I do think that contracts, tax forms, and even my cellular phone bill are all special pieces of art if one is able to step back and realize how much these little things are a sincere part of their lives.
Gallery exhibitions are really fabulous to have as a form of public communication too. Art needs the context of being placed within the context of starting an intellectual dialogue and discourse session. Without this context, there would be only this void and art would be merely for art's sake which defeats the purpose of why one paints or does conceptual art if even that artist is the only person that sees the pieces. Plus they are a lot of fun to join and help out.
For example, Art Raw Gallery is an emerging artist gallery in Chelsea which has a touch of the raw experimentation that was going on during the counterculture era with uncensored self-expression. James Cohen Gallery in conjunction with the NURTUREart benefit exhibition was a fabulous venue to exhibit a smaller study of one of my abstraction paintings and so on. Each venue is like solving an individual problem and to be able to engage the viewer with a visual solution based on the set constraints of the space. Makes for good art engineering supposedly.
Also as I have grown professionally I've begun to slow down where I exhibit work. It's very exhausting to have to pursue scattershot locations but with the scale of my projects going up, I think that a few group shows and one solo show per year would be sufficient for the type of workload I have to deal with. Hopefully, with potential gallery representation, the workload can ease as I don't have to focus on the self-marketing as much and then I can focus on getting back to the heart of the studio time I really do need.
Best is to have fun wherever you exhibit. Know that as long as you can pour your heart into each project, the people will appreciate what you have achieved based on your conceptual drive. Most of all, I really enjoy the huge challenge of trying to figure out to fit my work into any given architectural form.
Brian Sherwin: Is there a specific message that you strive to convey as far as the art world is concerned? If you could contact every artist, curator, art critic, and art dealer-- and every other ‘player’ within the art world-- what would you say?
qi peng: The message that I hope to convey to the public about the contemporary art world is that it is very much a game in the sense of the later Wittgenstein. All art projects and transactions are a form of thought experiments which are conducted within the context of this huge game plan. Just as Wittgenstein refers to language-games as a way of us to manipulate single words to express a meaningless subject, an art dealer has to offer a context for a single painting to have meaning through the exhibition game.
To clarify, the word "water" doesn't mean anything just by itself except when we choose to give it a context such as a command like "WATER!" or a question like "Water?" Similarly, a Xylor Jane painting doesn't have any singular meaning just by itself unless the gallery owner can explain its own context within art history or the use of its images relative to other types of art such as photography or other square paintings or even outsider spiritual art.
Paintings have to interact in this larger game in order to gain validity just as the word "water" has to gain validity through the repeated acceptance by others as a term by the linguists. A painting by Xylor Jane has to function in the way that the art market game has to define why a Jane artwork ought to be important through the networks of art critics and museum curators who are trusted by the collectors and general public that her works have critical importance.
The riddle is that the "meaning" of a painting has to be defined by an external force rather than its inherent properties of just being another bunch of shapes and lines on a support. What makes that particular combination of paint special over that of an amateur? That's the problem that art critics have to solve is how to interpret (read here the word "market" as well) for the public who may not understand the piece on a first glance.
Also here is the crux of the problem. If an artist chooses not to abide by the rules of this game, then he or she tends to get left out of the equation of recognition, sadly enough. Which is why my interview portraits are an attempt to democratize the art system. I can offer a chance to showcase an emerging artist with the same tools as an established artist and so on. This pecking order within the hierarchy of the contemporary art world can be deconstructed. Feels like some type of liberation movement, in an odd way.
For me to be able to speak to each art professional and tell them to be yourself would probably be too much of a naive approach. I sincerely would like to express my interest in being able to remove the front to see what the true character of a particular person would be regardless of status or the label the public imposes on them.
For example, Buck Naked's blog "How's My Dealing?" has a lot of really interesting anecdotes about individual curators or gallery owners and like a cubist portrait, one could create a composite of the whole person in question. Granted a lot of information on that website one has to take with a grain of salt but it does provide an insight that a magazine like Art+Auction would never touch in terms of the quirks of the individual.
I think that the impersonal attitude has been way too dominant within reporting of the arts and the general public has a very hard time to relate to the highbrow so much. That explains why street art and lowbrow art has become much more popular recently because people can enjoy rather than argue about the artwork, which makes for good debates indeed.
The art market has become a rather elaborate chess game since the early 1980's before the rise of the blue-chip galleries such as Gagosian and Mary Boone. A lot of it has to do with Reagan's economic policies being the mantra for people's outrageous behavior during that time period and since the art world reflected that milieu, the "greed is good" mentality somewhat infected the expectations of collectors and even some artists and gallerists. Plus the shift of power from the gallery to the collector was a huge trend that anyone with a lot of wealth could define the museum acquisitions and collections marketing such as the Phaidon monographs that are associated with the Rubell Family Collection in Miami.
My artwork does touch on those economic issues in a rather direct way and by asking the art professional how they are dealing with the recession and its aftermath becomes a telling signal for not only the state of the art market's health but also the individual's personality in the way that they deal with hardships on a psychological level.
Brian Sherwin: Is there anything else you would like to say about your art?
qi peng: First of all, I would like to thank you, Brian Sherwin, for taking the time to host this discussion with me about topics of your own choosing. I think that it has been rather delightful to be able to converse with you regarding some rather challenging topics that aren't always easy to address or even contemplate.
Also this is a chance to thank the myartspace website to allow me to feature some traditional and some conceptual work which may seem bizarre at a first glance. I truly think that myartspace points in the direction of combining successfully the driving force between social networking websites as well as the traditional framework of gallery networking.
On a professional level, I would like to thank the following people who have supported me thick and thin through wind and fire: Barbara Ann Levy (wonderful gallerist and fellow New Yorker in Florida), Camilla Fallon (fellow Yale graduate), Peter Halley at Yale University and Mary Boone, Wendy White at Leo Koenig (fabulous artist), Christina Ray at Glowlab (most fabulous-est gallerist), Vanessa Buia at Buia Gallery, Daniel Gellis at The Conference Room Gallery, Brian Staker at Salt Lake City Weekly, Sibyll Kalff at Iao PROJECTS, Ruth Lubbers at VSA Arts of Utah, Edward Winkleman with his brilliant Winkleman Gallery, William Powhida (still owe you one), James Kalm with The Kalm Report, Mindy Kober at Iao PROJECTS, Ruby Carlsruh, Vincent de Sarthe, Alex Farkas, James Wagner and Barry Hoggard at ArtCat, Travis Tanner and his assistants at Tanner Frames, all those people who agreed to become part of the interview portrait project, the Gateway Apple Store whose employees who had to bear with me using their station as a temporary office, and pretty much everyone in the galaxy of the art world I love too much... I am sorry if I left you out here.
On a personal level, I would like to thank the following persons: my guardian "stepfather" Powell, my family and close friends too numerous to name here, Circlegal at Iao PROJECTS, The Street Phantom (Joey Krebs), Adam and Marie Rosepink, Paul Winkfield, Andrew Wrigley, Alexis Granwell at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, David Andrew Frey at culturehall, David B. Smith at HQ, Eric Doeringer the infamous painting bootlegger, Ilse Murdock, Brian Sherwin at myartspace, Kadar Brock the Absolut genius painter, and my close friend Matt Jones at Buia Gallery who has some of the most beautifullest works in this world.
Without people, I doubt that I could make it or want to make it as an artist. Yes, art is in my bloodstream. I don't think that I could ever step away from the home plate of the act of creation in the stadium of an artist.
On a final note, I do wish to allude to a much more fascinating conceptual art which I am in the midst of: an Eharmony dating conceptual art project. I am trying still to figure out how to convert the private details of my search for the girlfriend of my dreams as a work of art, but it isn't as easy as I thought it would be.
I am thinking about the final product of a flowchart drawing but right now I'm still plugging along in the early stages of this wonderfully offbeat work of performance art combined with hopefully some traditional artwork based on Eharmony. At least, I won't need the help of Dr. Phil in any case.
Now, only if I could figure out to make the wedding as part of a solo exhibition... could the gallerist act as the priest witnessing the vows... just another thought... LA FIN.
To view my entire interview with qi peng please click on the 'qi peng' label below. You can learn more about qi peng by visiting his website-- www.qipeng.net. You can read more of my interviews by visiting the following page-- www.myartspace.com/interviews.
document 2, by qi peng. Courtesy of The Barbara Ann Levy Galleryand qi peng / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York.
Brian Sherwin: For one project, titled 'documents', you sent unsolicited submission letters to over 400 galleries throughout the United States. My understanding is that you saved the acceptance and rejection letters as a part of this project. In a sense, your project documented the struggles that many emerging artists have while seeking gallery representation. Can you go into further detail about this specific project?
qi peng: The "documents" series is a compilation of both acceptance and rejection letters that resulted from my experiences of having put together some faux portfolios of some gaudy artwork that I crudely executed and putting together a packet for various galleries throughout the nation, mostly concentrating on my hometown of New York City.
I started this project in October 2007 and began with a successful registration of my artwork with the Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York organization because I knew that I could garner a good reply letter from them. It was then that I made two trips to New York City and one trip to Denver in order to slam dunk, in a good way, my resume and portfolios to all sorts of places ranging from blue-chip galleries such as Mitchell, Innes, and Nash all the way to more underground joints such as Participant, Inc. It was rather expensive but I was glad to have the help of my "stepfather" Powell who was willing to call up each gallery one by one to find out what the submission policy was. I guess that it was my earliest collaboration by far.
Joseph Beuys once said that everybody is an artist. Funnily enough, the documents series have been proving otherwise that it is a circle of tastemakers who define who can become "the artist." It's very much like the wine industry in that there is a whole lot of politics involved in getting certification indeed. What we need is a bottle shock in the art industry and I think that the internet is helping out with the shifting of the gallery system such as the online only galleries of NYAXE, Ugallery, Collegeartonline (CAO), and The Barbara Ann Levy Gallery which was a former New York space now relocated to West Palm Beach, Florida.
Also more traditional galleries are offering online purchase options such as Paige West's Chelsea gallery Mixed Greens where anyone can pick up a Kammy Roulner drawing on the fly. I seriously do believe that if the art market can be forged as being more transparent then the artist and collector relationship can develop into a more positive direction without all the drama that's involved in product placement.
And there is the emotional struggle that is hidden within the codes of these documents indeed. It's also rather awesome to see the infinite number of ways that the character of "qi peng" is rejected by each gallery assistant or director. The LewAllen Contemporary rejection was the most hilarious one since it was sent as a personalized postcard lacking a signature. Hopefully I can thank them for sending me a mass mailed rejection letter someday. Granted, I don't make it rather evident through the rather perfunctory typefaces and corporate gallery logos like some twisted riddle but the viewer would need to read literally between the lines.
I think that too many people can attack the fact that much of conceptual art can be too nerdy or detached for their liking which is why I pursue conceptual art projects that have a "beating heart," something that I can capture with the tonality of personal emotion without the veneer of over-analysis. Plus there is so much black humor in my own utter stupidity in trying to find gallery representation like a shotgun wedding.
Contacting galleries like this just doesn't work, and knowing the tragic end of it, there it emphasizes the beauty of my happy failure as an artist whose success is at the mercy of the critics and curators nowadays. Hopefully the documents can make for some good vintage wine labels someday! After all, I see each gallery submission as a scientific experiment gone awry like some perverse tilting at the illusory windmills.
Plus, we live in this world that is immersed in documentation. The inherent contradiction is that we require more documentation to become more transparent to the public eye yet the documentation which has too many pages tends to obfuscate the truth. It's like having so much details that obscurity rather than clarity is the result. Strange, isn't it? The same applies to my life through these seemingly straightforward documents that rejected or accepted the character of "qi peng."
People who skim these drawings will think that oh, it's a rejection or acceptance thing. I am hoping for a profound engagement where people begin to ask questions like, "How was qi peng rejected from this gallery?" or "Why was qi peng rejected from the final round of this art competition?" It's like trying to paint a portrait of qi peng based on people's responses to the character without ever having seen the real person like some mysterious Godot character where a whole play can be based on a physically "nonexistent" persona.
And the art world gets caught up in this type of paperwork similarly to the federal tax organizations. That is the strange irony of the supposed freedom that causes a lot of people to stereotype the supposedly bohemian workings of the gallery system. It's a jungle of bureaucracy out here and easy to get caught up within its spider web.
document 13 by qi peng. Courtesy of The Barbara Ann Levy Galleryand qi peng / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York.
Brian Sherwin: Out of curiosity-- as I’m sure some readers will ask this upon reading our interview-- how many rejection letters did you receive compared to acceptance letters? Also, is the project ongoing?
qi peng: Wow, I haven't kept count really but in terms of gallery representation I have scored a big, fat zero which is not surprising there. The acceptance letters I have received so far have been from organizations such as Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York and a few others. I even got a rejection letter in the form of a critique that specified that the judges couldn't determine the dimensions of the paintings I had submitted the images for even though I tabulated the dimensions on a separate sheet of paper. Very hilarious indeed!
This project has been ongoing although honestly, things have been slowing down as I focus on the interview portraits more and more. In reality, I think that gallery representation will fall naturally on its own terms but I have no interest in being a critical darling or rock star in the contemporary art world. I consider myself to be a daily bread median worker, a part of the overall system who is happy to labor each and every day. No perks needed in fact.
I look forward to extending the idea behind the documents series into other things such as exhibiting my complete receipts from a whole year of buying stuff in 2008. Once, I was tempted nearly to exhibit my tax filing returns to the IRS as a work of art but perhaps that would have caused problems with the government if they found out that I was too forthright about my business. I know that art is the delicate balance in becoming too transparent about one's own intentions and disappearing magically into the background to see what follows.
So the current score is at last count: approximately 5 acceptances to about 25 rejections. Not bad although right now I'm currently in the process of working out gallery representation with someone I know. Details to be finalized later on, I suppose.
The documents series is a self-perpetual machine in many ways as I execute more artwork ready for the public to examine and determine whether they approve or disapprove of it. Which is why I am crossing my fingers for the series to infiltrate my upcoming artist's books that become issues of a DIY Parkett's. Overtones of Nabokov, I guess. kadar brock at paula copper by qi peng. Courtesy of The Barbara Ann Levy Gallery and qi peng / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York.
Brian Sherwin: I understand that you are working on a project titled 'imaginary exhibitions'. For this project you will establish fake exhibitions at real or dead art spaces that exist in real time. Can you go into further detail about this specific project and your thoughts behind it?
qi peng: The imaginary exhibitions project was started because during the past year, I saw so many of my gallery stomping grounds disappear due to the terrible economy. The disappearance of a place like Roebling Hall or Rivington Arms was alarming as I had a chance to walk through their spaces last spring. Now they continue to exist as a memory in my own head. Also there is the playful fantasy of having the "power" to play the role of "curator" or "gallery owner" by allowing my artists friends to "exhibit" in places that they could dream about being in.
For example, it was fabulous to imagine having my friend Kadar Brock over at Paula Cooper Gallery which is a fairly respectable space. Ironically, after I showed him the piece online, Kadar mentioned that he enjoyed the ad that I created for his forthcoming show there this fall and I was happy about his assessment of this supposed event.
Apart from the fact that I get to celebrate the wonderful variety of my artist friends, the imaginary exhibition series is probably the closest that I will achieve to any form of institutional critique as I can use the parody framework to play on the branding of galleries (which Ashley Bickerton or Tom Sachs could probably do on a larger scale) as well as demonstrating that shows are created through valid art connections rather than the actual "worth" of the artwork being presented. A lot of the exhibitions are read through the context of how it's shown rather than the inherent meaning that the work delivers.
That's the irony of it but one can see that Saatchi's creation of the Hirst marketing machine during the past two decades seems to bear this theory out. Yes, it's somewhat sad that good art is manufactured a lot through effective marketing strategies which can create a dangerous precedent for how future artists, especially students, will think. And that mentality can create such a terrible example for the way that studio visits and art criticism is so dependent on the way that the art market system functions. One only needs to look at the way that commercial street art has usurped the symbolism of the iconography of revolutionaries. Poor Che Guevara must be rolling in his grave over how his image has become such a visual cliche!
Also this particular series allows me to play around in the sandbox of graphic design. By reconstruction of these fictional ads, I am glad to be able to put together the elements of a self-made marketing schema. It's certainly not easy to recreate or mimic the fonts that each gallery chooses by any means. I consider this to be a step forward in the idea of transparency and the DIY approach in the branding mechanism.
I also enjoy the strong challenge of parodying the marketing methods with this ironic homage to the gallery spaces that I enjoyed visiting, whether or not they are defunct. The most essential aspect of this is to put a huge twist on appropriation art with the unique touch of reinvention. I guess that digital collage would be its closest counterpart.
Luckily, I haven't heard back from any of the gallery spaces about these rather hilarious ads. I try to match the ad space to a particular format such as the square for ArtForum or the standard letter size for some of the other mainstream art magazines or exhibition postcard sizes. I hope to be able to continue working on this particular series even though it's quite a number of hours just to get one spread completed.
spray painting 18, by qi peng. Courtesy of The Barbara Ann Levy Gallery and qi peng / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York.
Brian Sherwin: You also create paintings and works on paper-- and have explored photography as well. Which mediums do you enjoy the most?
qi peng: Actually, I really enjoy painting the best. It's close to something which is spontaneous from the heart and a good break from the zany nature of my conceptual artwork. The spray paint works have gotten some decent attention and I am glad that my artist friend Matt Jones enjoys the ones in his own private collection.
On the surface they resemble a much more colorful hybrid between Wendy White (another fabulous mixed media artist) with Christopher Wool on acid. I sincerely enjoy exploring the limits of gestural abstraction where the painting is a record of my hand movements across the support. I also do a lot of works on paper that range from industrial landscapes to pretty mundane, in a good way, pen and ink-type of portraits.
Lately I've been planning the execution of some traditional oil paintings based on the scenes of Larry Salander and his family. To probe the drama behind the art dealer who is best remembered for his fraud is worth exploring from a psychological and metaphysical way. I think that it will be full of dark humor and irony when the series will be completed on a long-term scale. Plus it's a sly dig at the fact that Salander wasn't a big fan of Koons or Warhol and probably conceptual art in the same boat too.
Ironically, it's also a small counterbalance against the art magazine media's one-dimensional portrait of Salander as this art world Madoff. He definitely is a huge cheater but I want to be more of the Sherlock Holmes here in this instance. For example, why did this guy try to extend his magical powers to commit fraud on his various clients? What drove him to such underhanded manners?
I am excited that the paintings that I will be featuring will be in black and white to symbolize the grey nature of art dealing as well as in mirror image to symbolize the reversal of fortune for the man and his family as well as the backwards moral code that he followed. Also, there will be huge surprise with these traditional paintings as the ultimate irony but I wouldn't want to divulge the secret until after the series is over, if ever.
I surmise that being labeled as a conceptual artist allows for such a broad latitude that we cannot avoid being attracted all types of self-expression and execution of particular ideas into a final form. Painting is one of many tools which works more often than not which is why I delve so much into that realm. And for me, that is the most satisfying component of having a wide latitude like one of my heroes, Martin Kippenberger.
Brian Sherwin: What are your thoughts concerning the internet as a medium, so to speak. In recent years there has been an increase in art projects involving the internet. Do you feel that artists will continue to utilize the internet as a medium-- what is the future, in your opinion, for internet based art?
qi peng: Well, the internet has been such an influence for a very long time on the art world. For example, the marvelous German photographer Thomas Ruff has been appropriating pornographic imagery straight off the web years ago to blow them up to pixelated epics. Now I think that he does landscape photos that are very pixelated too. Also with internet projects such as Wikipedia Art, which is funny because there is a public portrait of "qi peng" on Wikipedia too, as well as artwork that contain Abode Flash animation with click-and-point capabilities which deliver very intriguing results.
I really do attest that it's not just the rich visual resources that the internet can provide for the base of imagery for painters, photographers, and even sculptors. It all boils down to the tradition of cataloguing, which I can point to the many decades that Gerhard Richter kept a visual encyclopedia within his Atlas series. Classification also becomes an essential artist's tool as well which allows one to draw the historical referents and method of artistic presentation.
I don't think that one ought to use the internet as a crutch for the creation of particular pieces but that it is important to celebrate the diverse vocabulary of the visual potentials with the internet as the conceptual jumping point indeed.
After all, there can be so much done with Google Maps or thumbnail imagery in remembering how much the internet is a fictional creation of our everyday reality through the portal of the computer. It's the imaginary mirror to our true souls and for me, cannot replace the base emotional crux of human relationships. So I prefer to leave the internet as one of many great tools that the artist has at his or her disposal.
Also the interview portraits wouldn't have been as successful without the networking tools of Twitter, Facebook, and just the World Wide Web itself. It would have been nearly impossible for me to travel extensively within reasonable expenses to visit each individual who was and will be involved within this particular series. Thus, the internet becomes a key component within the final artwork itself.
I guess that you could argue that many artists' websites end up being a work of art too. Plus I sincerely believe that the website for Aqua Art Miami is just one of the finest masterpieces of graphic design and online art in terms of being able to contain dense amounts of information with a clean and elegant interface. I can't help looking at the typography of anything which I see on any website I surf to anyways.
Brian Sherwin: Can you go into further detail about some of your influences?
qi peng: Well, I have such varied influences that it would be nearly impossible to delineate all of them here. So basically I will try to touch on the major ones here as much as I can within the next few sentences.
For the conceptual art component, I can name drop the following: Maurizio Cattelan (the biggest influence by far), Dan Colen, Terence Koh, Hans Haacke, Jenny Holzer, John Baldessari, Wade Guyton, Tom Sachs, On Kawara, Mark Lombardi, Mel Bochner, Art & Language, and Sophie Calle as the main people who inspired me.
For my paintings, works on paper, and photography, I can name check the following: Christopher Wool, Anselm Reyle, Wendy White (whose mixed media spray paint works I MUST recommend highly), Matt Jones (great friend), Kadar Brock (fabulous friend), Ion Birch, Marilyn Minter, Thomas Ruff, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Stephen Shore, Martin Kippenberger, Andrew Wrigley (wonderful friend), Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Claude Monet, Juan Gris, Wade Guyton, Kelley Walker, Dash Snow, Kristen Baker, Mark Lombardi (again), Paul Cezanne, Franz Kline, Jasper Johns, and so on.
I think that discovering more artists through myartspace, blogs, and mainstream art publications have bolstered my enjoyment of all art, even stuff that many people dismiss such as outsider art.
You can learn more about qi peng by visiting his website-- www.qipeng.net. You can read more of my interviews by visiting the following page-- www.myartspace.com/interviews.
qi peng was born in Queens, New York in 1976 and received his masters degree at Yale University. He is a conceptual artist who executes “interviews” as a form of collaborative portraits with various art professionals and also uses primary/secondary documents to examine the contemporary art market. Occasionally he does paintings, photographs, and works on paper. The artist’s studio is located near downtown Salt Lake City and he works sometimes in New York City for street art or fine art special projects.
He has been exhibited in various places including the Projects Gallery, The Lab at Belmar, modern8 Gallery, James Cohan Gallery/NURTUREart, Metro Pictures, Art Raw Gallery, and Anna Kustera. qi peng is currently represented by The Barbara Ann Levy Gallery based out of West Palm Beach, Florida (www.balgallery.com). qi peng will have his first solo show at Envoy Gallery located in Lower East Side, New York City during June 2009.
spray painting 18, by qi peng. Courtesy of The Barbara Ann LevyGallery and qi peng / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York.
Brian Sherwin: You received your masters degree at Yale University. Can you discuss your academic years? Did you have any influential peers or instructors?
qi peng: Art school at Yale University (also did studies in public health) was a fairly rigorous institution that focused on the artist being able to coordinate efficiently into the game of the contemporary art world. Apart from some of the best resources of the two art museums on campus, there was this weight of history throughout my time there.
After all, art students at Yale have to deal with the legacy of heavyweights such as Richard Serra, Chuck Close, and Robert Mangold from decades ago. There are also more recent successes such as Jessica Stockholder, Matthew Barney, Rosson Crow, and Justine Kurland from the younger generation. The students realize this.
Yale had a rather tight atmosphere. However, it wasn't competitive in the sense of being cutthroat. Yes, there were the times of backstabbing like some random episode of "Gossip Girl" but I wasn't the type to be involved in such affairs. I enjoyed studio time. It had to be on the downlow because I was somewhat of a conceptual artist and not really a painter at the time. I burned a ton of midnight oil at the Sterling Library where I did a lot of research as well.
I took a class in Russian literature and many in business school for management and economics, particularly regarding the health care field. I think that for me, walking to other parts of the school to take non-art classes, helped put my artwork into perspective at the time. Unfortunately, I have destroyed much of my legacy from that time and the earliest work that still exists are some pretty profane sketches I did when I moved to Philadelphia after graduate school.
I think that for me the liberal arts approach as well as the secret audit of classes due to Yale's strict policies really helped quite a bit in cornering me into the art prankster whom I am today.
william powhida (panel 1) by qi peng. Courtesy of The Barbara AnnLevy Gallery and qi peng / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York.
In terms of influence back then, Peter Halley was and still is my personal favorite dude there. It is certain that he emphasized conceptual drive as well as being one of the primary movers and shakers of Neo-Geo abstraction. For me, I seriously believe that his methodology had such a great impact in my current studio habits because I really stopped executing artwork without a pre-planning stage. Hard to be spontaneous without tons of notes now.
Oh, and also his use of beautifully garish neon colors had a strong influence on my preferences for a industrial and flourescent color palette mixed with more traditional colors within the series of spray painted works on canvas and papers I've been pursuing during the past few years. There is no doubt that Halley was the person key to my development of what I do and seek within my artistic practice now.
Also Yale has a wonderful system for being able to place their graduates into the New York gallery system with its connections. Even though I ended up doing the public health circuit for years to get some experience with the everyday person, art has never been latent within me during all those years. Plus, without my strong experiences in other subjects particularly postmodern fiction and poetry, I doubt that I would have been pursuing the current admixture of visual and verbal cues within my interview portrait series.
And one mustn't forget that new media art is very much the conjunction of art with computer science and the branch of logic, particularly with the hypertext concept as the focus of the death of a single loci in knowledge. It's very hard to escape the web of references, even within the seemingly traditional artwork, that is in vogue nowadays.
edward winkleman (panel 2), by qi peng. Courtesy of The Barbara AnnLevy Gallery and qi peng / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York.
Brian Sherwin: As a conceptual artist you have executed "interviews" for your project titled 'portraits'. The "interviews" are a form of collaborative portrait with various art professionals and also involves primary and secondary documents in order to examine the contemporary art market. Can you discuss this aspect of your work and why you decided to do it?
qi peng: At first, I was thinking about keeping a studio diary when I began to exhibit professionally two years ago after a six year hiatus. Ironically, after discovering the radical works of Sophie Calle, I seriously contemplated being able to deconstruct the boundaries between the private and public domains of my real and fictional lives, as "qi peng" is my pen name, and then I could have this realistic character whose body I could assume the identity of.
I pondered about why many artists wouldn't want to disclose what the process was for their becoming a successful artist and since I was rather process-oriented within my artistic focus recently, I felt that converting this studio diary of my acceptance and rejection letters would make for a fabulous series of prints and components for a future installation project.
After all, there is this remarkable sense of humanity in being able to analyze each step of an art career, whether it be mired in failure (ironically the title of one of my group exhibitions last year at the Laboratory at Belmar) or crowned success like a lot of the younger artists who seemed to achieve rock star success with the blue-chip galleries during the previous decade of the Bush Administration.
For me, the journey to my ultimate failure, being a rather cynical and humorous existentialist at best, was worth well documenting as a long-term art project. It seems now very logical to destroy any boundaries between art and my own life as art has become too addictive as a palliative to my own ills and joys.
april gornik (panel 1) by qi peng. Courtesy of The Barbara Ann LevyGallery and qi peng / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York.
Ironically, the interview portraits were a logical extension of the documents series that I had been focusing on during the past two years. The documents series is a Don Quixote-like search for gallery representation, which has become like a quest for the Holy Grail-- a mock fantasy if you will.
The documents series for me had too much of an ego trip, or mock ego trip as I interpreted them, so I felt that I wanted to diminish my own supposed achievements. That's the main reason why my name of "qi peng" is always lower case (which it's rather hilarious to see no two people spell my name the same way) because I see my humble artwork as the product of an artisan and not some thrill seeker like Julian Schnabel.
It was this sense of humility that I realized how much I wanted to do more collaborative work without losing the qi peng stamp. Logically, going the direction of a formalist structure such as the interview question and answer format would counteract the mass media's tendency to portray everybody as this one-dimensional stereotype and add a touch of humanity to each single art professional just like a commissioned portrait.
Also what is rather fascinating is that these interviews are the true intersection between more traditional art and new media art as I haven't met most of these people in the flesh yet but only through Facebook, email, and the internet. And yet many of them have become good friends as well.
Art magazines, just like most other media outputs, have this tendency to make these stereotypes too often in scripted articles that they pump out on a monthly basis. Ironically, Art in America magazine has recently started doing a monthly interview with a name-brand artist, such as Terry Winters. For me, my interview portraits are less about journalism as I hardly have the credentials to do any newspaper writing and more about grasping a sense of humanity using brushstrokes of words. I guess that the bitter irony is that the semblance of doing a piece of new journalism has caused people to ignore the fact that I am primarily a visual artist.
One can see a counterpart in the xerox book installation entitled "Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art" that Mel Bochner (a former Yale professor actually) exhibited back in 1966 when he was teaching at the School of Visual Arts at the time. I guess that people in the counterculture decade were more interested in the underlying process rather than the final product which is marketable. That explains the heyday of conceptual art which I think hasn't been as bold as the pre-Reagan era which was the rise of global consumerism during that era. I think that sometimes raw art is the way to go if that is the proper solution to the artist's puzzle.
I think that viewers need to see that my interview portraits are less of institutional critique and more of an objective type of verbal photography similar to the social portraits that August Sander, the friendly headshot portraits of Chuck Close, and the serial workouts of Thomas Ruff all executed during the last century. I am hoping to capture the zeitgeist of the contemporary art world without being too flippant like the infamous William Powhida or the enfant terrible Hans Haacke who was hypercritical of the system.
I do find the art world too anti-democratic in some of its functioning and for me, doing these interview portraits are a way to rectify the balance of power and bringing the art back to the hands of the people and away from the elitism. Either that or I have too much of the old school Marxist in my bloodstream.
I do hope that the viewers of these projects are going to appreciate the sense of "human-ness" regarding of their professional label of museum curator or gallerist or conceptual artist and see a flesh and blood person behind the mask, the label that we participants often get too caught up in. I think that reflecting on each other is the key to helping out artists and gallery owners become better people through art.
matt jones (panel 1) by qi peng. Courtesy of The Barbara Ann Levy Gallery and qi peng / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York.
My questions, at best, are failed examples of objective "reportage" since my selective focus betrays the artist's own hand in the situation. This is the same dilemma that a documentary photograph who works for a news wire has to face as well. No photograph can be truly objective and even the most causal snapshot reflects the intention of the author through the act of cropping reality. My interviews can only approximate the whole figure of the art professional because there are certain aspects of the personality that I can only reach.
Think of it this way, even a full body portrait that Lucian Freud executes cannot trap the whole personage because there are hidden spiritual aspects that are hidden within the guts of the human being. At least, I make a concerted effort to engage the conversation to cover all types of topics ranging from personal habits and hobbies to restaurant recommendations and curating habits. I wouldn't be too surprised if a few gallerists, artists, etc. got sort of pissed off by my attempts to be too "intrusive" like some reality television show.
In any case, each interview portrait thus becomes a form of elegant collusion between the two characters to draw out self-identity. Happily enough, many of the people have used these portraits for their press material so it was nice to help them out just as well.
You can learn more about qi peng by visiting his website-- www.qipeng.net. You can read more of my interviews by visiting the following page-- www.myartspace.com/interviews.
alexis granwell panel 1 (2009), ink on paper, 8.5” x 11" by qi peng
edward winkleman panel 2 (2009), ink on paper, 8.5” x 11" by qi peng
william powhida panel 1 (2009), ink on paper, 8.5” x 11" by qi peng
"untitled collaborative piece" by David B. Smith and qi peng.
document 13 by qi peng. Courtesy of The Barbara Ann Levy Galleryand qi peng / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York.
kadar brock at paula copper by qi peng. Courtesy of The Barbara Ann
william powhida (panel 1) by qi peng. Courtesy of The Barbara AnnLevy Gallery and qi peng / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York.
edward winkleman (panel 2), by qi peng. Courtesy of The Barbara AnnLevy Gallery and qi peng / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York.
april gornik (panel 1) by qi peng. Courtesy of The Barbara Ann LevyGallery and qi peng / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York.
matt jones (panel 1) by qi peng. Courtesy of The Barbara Ann Levy Gallery and qi peng / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York.