Peng Zuqiang

Critical text

Peng Zuqiang (b. 1992, Changsha) works with moving images. His films¾short vignettes often shot on 16mm¾reflect on the camera’s gaze and its role in representation. As Alvin Li writes of his work, “[Peng] dwells on oftentimes neglected moments of everyday queer life¾silence and melody, gazing and touching, gossip and rumour¾to amplify the social and political resonances of these minor modes of communication”. At Present Future Peng shows Sight Leak (2022), a 16mm black and white film shot in and around his hometown. Based on Roland Barthes’ posthumous work Travels in China, a journal of his visit to China in 1974, the artist revisits the French intellectual’s observations of the country through a voiceover of recorded dialogues discussing the themes of class, queerness, and desire, in Barthes’ account over the top of footage of Changsha.

Text by Saim Demircan, Maurin Dietrich