Penghang Liu MRSS

Penghang’s practice examines the missing and lost parts of our life, which have left traces in our memory and drive us to return to then repeatedly, consciously or unconsciously.
 

By introducing the concept of light, he focuses on the visible but immaterial attributes of light, which make it equivalent to the nature of the things lingering in our memories: we can feel their presence in the depths of our minds, but they can never be touched.

Light can always attract people’s gaze and lead their eyes to a specific area. But this area is also full of illusionary lures – paralleling the classical Greek tale of the painting competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasius. When Zeuxis was drawn to the object behind the veil on Parrhasius’s painting and attempted to lift it, he discovered that the veil was merely part of the painting itself. From this point, Penghang’s practice explores the objects that attract us - Is the object behind the veil, which we regard as the truth, actually an illusion? Just as dreams reveal the truth of our desire, but dreams are also another form of illusion.
 

Exploring the sad beauty among the things cannot be touched, Penghang’s research interests also include Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis theory, especially the concept of ‘lack’, which is like a void area in our being: our desire is produced from here, and then return to here as a vain and illusionary complement for this void. Penghang combined it with the concept of ‘emptiness’ in Eastern philosophy, to reinterpret the tangled relation between ‘reality’ and ‘illusion’ in his art practice.