Kaikodo’s fifth exhibition devoted to contemporary Chinese painting, “A Modern Odyssey: Recent Works by Yu Peng”will run until 6 June. Yu Peng, from Taiwan, has chosen to ground his work in traditional Chinese literati painting while at the same time subverting that tradition through unconventional(including sexual)imagery and the inclusion of deliberately irrational details. This can be seen in Whistling Pines Fill the Northern Peaks, which is firmly within the tradition of literati painting in its title, its emphasis on landscape, its densely worked surface and the carefully isolated and familiar motifs, such as the pavilion, the flowering prunus in a vase and the garden rocks. A closer look reveals a very different world than that inhabited by the traditional Chinese literatus, however. The figures, through which one would expect to appreciate the landscape, conform to no readily understood types, and imbue their surroundings with a strange, almost dream-like atmosphere. One realizes that details which at first appeared familiar are slightly skewed so that they, too, fit comfortably into Yu’s world.
The humour in the unexpected appearance of modern, near-naked figures in this painting is found throughout Yu’s work in One Dream From a Floating Life, for example, a nude, Guanyin-like woman poses modestly at the top of a paradisal garden filled with an array of seemingly disconnected figures who might have wandered in from the streets of Taipei.
“Yu Peng lives in a universe of his own creation,”writes Arnold Chang in volume Ⅷ of Kaikodo Journal, which is based on this show: “Everything and everyone he comes in contact with is transformed in accordance with his vision. When we view his art we become part of his world. It is a world of visual delights and sensual pleasures. Yu is a world that is both modern and ancient, Eastern and Western, earth-bound and transcendent, simple and complex.”

——ORIENTATIONS,June,1998