Chi Peng
(China 1981 – )
Consubstantiality I-1
- Location
- Not on display
- Further information
Chi Peng was born in Yantai, Shandong Province, China in 1981. He studied New Media art at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, graduating in 2005. In 2003 while still a student he was invited by independent curator Feng Boyi to participate in One to one: visions – recent photographs from China, at Chambers Fine Art, New York. The exhibition changed his life, his work was immediately sought after by collectors and museums worldwide.
Peng is known for his digitally manipulated images of figures positioned in unreal spaces. Many of these figures are nude; Peng regularly uses his own body. His work portrays the escapism, loneliness and fear of failure prevalent in his generation, a consequence of the one-child policy.
In the Consubstantiality series, gender boundaries are blurred. Viewers are confounded by figures with powdered faces and bodies and blurred gender – men with the body of women, and women with the chests of men. These subjects tell of how, despite their dual sexualities, they are in fact consubstantial — or, one and the same.
Consubstantiality is a notion in Christian theology referring to the common properties of the divine persons of the Christian Trinity, proposing that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are ‘of the same substance’ or ‘of the same essence’.
- Year
- 2004
- Media
- Photograph
- Medium
- type C photograph
- Dimensions
- 87.5 x 116.7 cm image; 97.2 x 126.8 cm sheet
- Signature & date
Not signed. Not dated.
- Credit
- Gift of Eleonora and Michael Triguboff 2019. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program
- Accession number
- 149.2019
- Copyright
- © Chi Peng
