Grand Synthesis: The Extraordinary Flower-Landscapes of Peng Kanglong

Curator: Craig L. Yee

Dates: 16 September, 2023 - 28 October, 2023

INKstudio’s first solo exhibition after the re-launch of its program in China this June will be the Mainland Chinese debut solo exhibition for the classically-trained flower and landscape painter Peng Kanglong (彭康隆, b. 1962 in Hualien, Taiwan). In the long history of Chinese brush and ink painting, landscape and flower painting are two distinct genres with their own metaphoric languages, painting techniques, representative masters and developmental histories. With the possible exception of Huang Binhong (1865–1955), Peng Kanglong is perhaps the first ink artist to explore the artistic possibilities of integrating these formerly separate genres. Whereas Huang Binhong's artistic breakthrough employs the brushwork of flower painting to transform landscape painting, Peng Kanglong works in the reverse direction employing the fine texture strokes and expansive compositional depth of landscape painting to render his extraordinary flowers.

Peng Kanglong graduated from the Taipei National University of the Arts in 1988 with a focus in Chinese brush and ink painting where he studied landscape painting under the traditional landscape painter and calligrapher He Huai-shuo. Starting with this foundation, Peng Kanglong soon developed a highly personal landscape-painting style that integrated the brushwork of late-Ming-early-Qing individualists such as Shitao (1642–1707) and Kuncan (1612 to after 1674) with the density and weight of the Modernist master of the landscape genre Huang Binhong. Peng Kanglong’s style—raw, sheng, bitter, ku, and at times astringent, se—was individualistic and uncompromising and oftentimes at odds with the prevailing orthodox taste of collectors shaped by the Qing Imperial Collection housed in the Taipei Palace Museum.

In 2013, Peng Kanglong began to experiment with the flower genre and with it discovered new avenues to explore the relationship between brushwork and form, composition and space and, very importantly, color and light. This new style of painting, rooted in the historical landscape but transformed through the integration of flower painting methods, forms, and means of expression gained an avid following amongst both experienced collectors of classical and modern Chinese painting and younger art collectors largely unfamiliar with historical brush and ink painting. The enthusiastic reception for Peng Kanglong’s new flower-landscapes also began to extend beyond his largely Taiwan Chinese audience. In 2014, Mee-Seen Loong and Nicholas Chow from Sotheby’s introduced Peng Kanglong’s works in New York and Hong Kong. In 2018, Sotheby’s Hong Kong presented Peng Kanglong’s new flower-landscapes at a sold-out solo exhibition entitled “Flowers of Evil”. In 2019, the Museum of Kyoto debuted Peng Kanglong’s newest flower-landscape paintings in Japan at their solo exhibition for the artist entitled “Mukuteki.”

Beginning in 2020, Peng Kanglong undertook an exploration of monumental compositional forms inspired by the Northern Song landscape. Combining the compositional scale of the Imperial landscape of the Northern Song with the expressive, autographic brushwork of the Yuan literati became an artistic goal of landscape painters in the periods that followed such as Shen Zhou (1427–1509) and Dong Qichang (1555–1636) of the Ming Dynasty, Wang Hui (1632–1717) and Gong Xian (1618–1689) of the Qing Dynasty and Huang Binhong of the Modern period. What distinguishes Peng Kanglong’s “Grand Synthesis” is his integration not just of composition and brushwork from the Song and Yuan-Ming-Qing periods but his simultaneous cross-integration of the encompassing landscape and flower genres.

In March of 2023, INKstudio featured one of these new works — Splendid Flowers Valley (2022) —  at its New York solo exhibition for Peng Kanglong entitled “Many Splendored Spring.” The New York Times in its review of Peng Kanglong’s show observed that “Modernism didn’t hit Asia quite like it did the West. Despite the tide of cultural innovation — not to mention wars and revolutions — genres like Chinese landscape painting survived the 20th century close to intact. So Peng Kanglong, who studied ink painting at Taipei National University of the Arts, can take inspiration from 17th-century monks as well as from a more recent predecessor like Huang Binhong (1865-1955); the lush scenes that result feel like contemporary rejoinders to an ancient conversation.”

In the current exhibition “Grand Synthesis,” INKstudio will feature eight more monumental works in this latest phase of Peng Kanglong’s ongoing synthesis of the landscape and flower genres including two enormously long handscrolls Speak and Act Cautiously (2020) and Contained Virtues (2020), the monumental hanging scroll Ode to the Mighty Peak (2022), and the two monumental horizontal scrolls Mountain Flower Romance (2023) and Glistening Dew (2023).

This will be the first time Mainland Chinese scholars, collectors and the art-loving public will have an opportunity to see and experience Peng Kanglong’s extraordinary flower-landscape syncretic creations in person.