qi peng

biography

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. He will be featured in the Winter 2009 issue of Studio Visit Magazine published by The Open Studios Press.

“Are artists, gallerists, etc. slaves to the system of the contemporary art world?” is the question that I choose to focus on. After watching the movies “Frost/Nixon” and “Interview,” I decided to set my sights on clarifying the social and professional relationships with the international art market. I am hoping to deconstruct through these “interviews” the Hegelian dialectic of master/slave that tends to get applied to the gallery director/artist and other art professional relationships. In February 2009, I decided to transform myself into a “fine arts journalist” through examiner.com as a long-term performance artist in order to investigate these myths about the art world.

With the ongoing series of verbal portraits in the form of “interviews,” each multi-panel artwork is a visual and textual representation of the person I am interested in. I am hoping to convey the human face behind the social labels of “gallery owner,” “curator,” “artist,” etc. to demonstrate the uniqueness of the individual. These portraits could have references to each other as artists talk about each other, etc. The richness of the contemporary art world is reflected in my conceptual installations just like the way August Sander attempted to capture his whole milieu of his social world.