Tang Contemporary Art is proud to announce the opening of Li Erpeng’s solo exhibition, entitled “ANIMAL N°5”, held in the headquarters gallery space. The exhibition features more than 20 pieces of works, showing a deep exploration of artists' psychological World.
War, senility, and death
Are as inevitable as
The oncoming iceberg
The world is a network of relationships.
These relationships not only make up our existence but also determine our purpose. One of the emerging post-95s artists, Li Erpeng uses his unique perspective and keen insight to explore the existence of relationships in the contemporary from the physical world to the psychological world.
ANIMAL N°5, created by Li Erpeng, is a living thing that couples animal instincts, human wisdom, and social disciplines with modern times. It is a metaphor, a symbol, and an experiment of how Li Erpeng observes, tames, and interrogates relationships. The exhibition presents the recordings of ANIMAL N°5, which observes its growth and annihilation from the perspective of a researcher. We follow its desire and motivation to explore the world of relationships; We perceive how its subconsciousness gathers together and becomes explicit; We observe how death and fear emerge and slowly integrate as part of the self over time.
Born in haste, grows in rage; lives in insecurity, rules in fear; ages in resentment, decays in bravery; finally, dies in innocence.
Existence itself is not meaningful. Instead, meaning lies in experiencing relationships in existence: love and grief, pride and fear, control and discipline, gathering these experiences together as the shell guides our heart and body to embrace death at ease.
Life constantly exists in instants. Li Erpeng spent five years creating it, watching its influence on the world, and vice versa, then withering away. We all are observers of this experiment, and like all relationships, this observation is also mutual. A part of it merges with us, regenerates, sublimates, and engages with the world. In this transcending space, we become our own experimental animals, constructing the world through self-observation and greeting death in the transient moment of connecting with the world.
Zhao Huaqing
Artist
Li Erpeng
Born in 1995, Dalian, Liaoning Province, China, Li Erpeng graduated from the Oil Painting Department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in 2018, and he currently lives and works in Beijing.
He has received First Prize for the Fine Arts at CAFA, the Inter Youth Artwork Award (2015), the Inter Youth Innovation Award (2016), the Originality at the Academy New Talent Award and the Outstanding Artwork Award from the Oil Painting Department at CAFA (2016). His graduation work Objects from an Ideal World was added to the permanent LYC Collection (CAFA Art Museum). In 2020, his work was collected by White Rabbit Gallery in Australia and recommended by TARGET magazine.