Tour Group in a Landscape

In Tour Group, figures stare out of the painting as if posing for a photograph. Surrounding them are the elements of a classical garden, including lotus ponds, scholars’ pavilions, trees, and rocks. The shapes of the rocks and plants merge with the equally strange shapes of the human figures drawn in childlike fashion. In the “distance” at the top of the painting, a dark and remote landscape looms. Yu Peng’s childhood interests in puppetry and ink and oil painting led him to develop a style so eccentric that he was denied admission into any fine arts school. His search for his cultural roots took him from his native Taiwan to mainland China, where he visited Beijing, Hangzhou, and the Buddhist caves at Dunhuang, in Gansu province. He found elements of folk art that he incorporated into his paintings. Exaggeration, spatial fragmentation, and deliberate clumsiness yield a comic theatricality. While creating a kind of “archaic awkwardness,” or gu zhuo, that was a hallmark of literati painting, they also subvert the refinements of that genre, reflecting the displacement of the Chinese painting tradition in the modern world of Taiwan.