2015 Life in Color
Florence & Venice Exhibition
Stephen Peng’s Art World in Italy
We’ll forget about our sorrows
And think about a brighter day
´Cause life is beautiful that way
There’s still another game to play
And life is beautiful that way
Theme Song of the Movie La Vita é bella
Stephen Peng has been active in the western fashion design field since 1980s and what has remained unchanged for the past 30 years is his ponytail and jean outfit. In 2007, when he retired and passed on the business in Shanghai, he took on a new identity, an artist --- an identity that he has long yearned for for nearly 40 years.
The pursuit for this identity did not come out of the blue, but rather, originated from his childhood interest and dream. Born in Hsinchu in 1947, Stephen Peng has shown his creative talent since childhood under the influence of his father who loved drawing, but subject to the family’s financial situation, he failed to receive further professional training. After graduated with a degree in business management, Stephen started a design business at the age of 25. His wholehearted devotion to the business successfully put him alongside world-renowned designers. However, the desire to paint was never forgotten. Finally, at the age of 60, Stephen realized his dream.
Don’t forget your original intention
Stephen Peng, deserves his name, and so are his artworks.
The viewers may have felt the magnificence and overflowing emotion when watching his works, but they would not have known that such powerful energy has been suppressed for 40 years. Stephen cherishes the present life as he takes up drawing again at the age of 60. He thinks that “life is short and thus priority shall now be given to the creation of paintings.” All works created at present are relatively big in size, with two thirds of them exceeding 2 meters long and the other one third also more than 1 meter long. “I think my open-mindedness may have resulted from my name, Xiong-hun (which literally means grand and powerful), which was given by my grandfather. Small-sized drawings will not be capable of conveying the grandness I want to express.” The first and most profound impression Stephen’s paintings have on the viewers is their level of richness and strength.
Life is always filled with ups and downs. How one should look back on and face the past is a profound learning. The Shinya Shokudo, an emotionally-comforting Japanese comic series and drama that has recently took the Asian countries by storm, describes a mysterious restaurant owner who could always make delicious heartwarming dishes out of ordinary food ingredients, de-arming exhausted diners visiting the restaurant late at night and opening up their minds. This life depicting drama struck a chord with the general public. Stephen’s paintings are another kind of spiritual feast. He draws both seeable sceneries as well as his own emotions. The pieces of drawings which portray life mingled with feelings and natural settings, are his observation towards life. The energy accumulated over dozens of years seem to flow out from Stephen endlessly. He still has a lot of thoughts that he wants to share with us, yet he never seemed impetuous or impatient. Rather, he soothes us with a calm tone and manifests the value and beauty of life with a positive approach. Without considerable life experience, his paintings would not have emitted such splendor and mind-pondering effect.
Return to the starting point of creation
“I have never regarded work as work for the past dozens of years”. Stephen takes everything seriously and tries his best in doing everything. His efforts and hard work have become the nutrients nurturing his artistic life little by little. Stephen believes that a designer shall remain curious about anything in order to produce good design works. Innovation is another key factor for success. He is unwilling to be stereotyped and has been thinking about all possibilities. With bright and clear self-confidence, his works, designed according to the trend, situation and mood, can always catch the eyes of the viewers with their glorious colors and distinctive personality, which leave the viewers deeply impressed. For him, to simply portray concrete objects is dull and unchallenging. Creation is not only a kind of interest to him, but also a kind of self-challenge. He wants to explore his infinite possibilities from creation.
Stephen knows how to live and enjoy life. He managed to squeeze time out of busy work schedule to visit major art galleries and museums across Europe and America. He enjoyed being baptized by art. He also loves to travel around with a camera, even to as far as the Amazon jungle, to capture different sceneries during leisure time. Even though he says modestly that he learned photography by himself just for fun and that his photographic technique is incomparable to professional photographers, he owns over 20 cameras and he even personally took the photos for the all the products he had designed; this sufficiently proving his excellent photographic ability. The superior command of the viewing angle and the capturing of the essence of the photographed subjects demonstrated through the photos taken during travel never failed to give off an unique charm and reflect his sharp yet tender insight and breakthrough in the pursuit of artistic expression. Such approach is also embodied in his creations on artworks.
As Stephen did not receive formal institutional training, he has an unconfined sense of creativity and the long dormant enthusiasm for creation is not weakened by the time. His ways of creation comprise splashing water on the drawings, mixing the pigments with a juice blender, painting with cement scraper and cleaning cloth, and so on. Recently, he even dipped the shoes of his granddaughter in paint to draw. He never sets boundary during creation. His achievement of the desired effect using various painting techniques had gone through extensive times of trying, exploring and experimenting. “Some people ask me, how could I make myself even more busy and tired after I started painting. I always tell them, you wouldn’t understand how much I really enjoy it.” When a sudden inspiration resulted in the opportune effect, the sense of achievement and satisfaction is simply indescribable.
Stephen considers his design spirit to be closely connected to the creation. He is able to accurately manipulate the arrangement and atmosphere of the picture through his long years of experience in design. He never makes a draft but splash ink directly and confidently on the canvas, as the artwork has already come into shape in his mind prior to painting. Although he adopts an abstract form of expression, the emotions are realistically and concretely portrayed. Using the moods at different stages of life as the theme, he recorded the precious moments in life with paintings in place of words. His works thus form a kind of unique vocabulary where the viewers can see the pigments arbitrarily flowing and merging into rhythmical coordination.
While the pictures seem to tumble and gallop constantly, they spark a space for imagination that is mesmerizing but not overbearing, vivid but not distracting.
Depart for Italy, again
Stephen received his first big order from Italy during the initial stage of his business setup in early 1980s. Later, his design of the four-color travel luggage for Benetton, an Italian famous brand, has made him a world-renowned designer ever since. Therefore, Italy is like a second hometown for Stephen in Europe, with a significant meaning. In early June, he will head for Italy again, except, this time he will visit Italy as an artist, not as a designer or an entrepreneur. European nobles have been in fond of fine arts and rendered great support to artists since ancient times. Thus, Stephen has specially decided to hold the art exhibition in the historical buildings in Florence and Venice, the two important arts towns, to serve as the new departing point for his new identity.
The exhibition “Life in Color 2015” will display 12 pieces of Stephen Peng’s art works, which will be categorized into three sections according to the stage of creation process, allowing the viewers to see the development and transformation of Stephen Peng’s paintings and get a closer look into his
colorful world.
From in his early works, we can feel Stephen’s exploration of rhythm and some parts of the paintings were even left blank. The Meltdown features sharp block segmentation and interesting flowing lines, in which much more man created visual effect, with the experimentation using brush, can be observed. This work can be regarded as the preliminary attempt of creation after Stephen has picked up painting again after all these years.
In the middle stage of his creation, representative works include the Italian landscape paintings, which will be displayed in the Exhibition. The paintings were inspired by the sceneries Stephen saw when he visited Positano, Italy, after his retirement. In his works, Positano VII, Positano VIII and Italy I, one can clearly see his bold use of rich, colorful backgrounds; dotted with fine and upright brush strokes to represent the village settlements by the hillside. By breaking away from the construction of depth via three-dimensional composition, he emphasized the visual rhythm of components arranged on the plane. The color blocks stacked and overlapped with each other, yet without visual interference, to give rise to brilliant flickering of light, shadow and mystic-dreamlike images, pulling viewers into Stephen’s impressive world of mountain scenery.
Through his recent works, it can be clearly observed that Stephen has eliminated the constraint of geometric shapes and allowed his own thoughts to flow at will; they demonstrated obvious self-projection and endowed the pictures with strong life-force. Spectrum_Red No.1 features a large proportion of red, with the auburn, reddish orange and other colors of the same tone merging into each other and producing a distant psychological state. While the calming blue, black and white emerge from the picture, creating a staid dialogue between the colors. On the other hand, Hometown Landscape IV displayed a more complicated level of expression and delicate stacking of colors, which is a spiritual demonstration of the artist’s deep-buried memories.
From these works, the viewers can see how Stephen merges the visual scenery with his perception of life through steady and smooth brush strokes, and wisely demonstrated the understanding of life accumulated from rich colors. Though the expression technique is abstract, the viewers can still feel the warmth and magnificence of the drawings.
Colored Drawing of Splendid Life
The extensive knowledge and travel collected from ordinary life, working experience and interest become the origin of the most abundant themes of the artistic creation. Stephen Peng chuckles that “I don’t know which theme to start with when I start painting”. There are too many memorable scenes and a lot of beautiful memories can be thought of when the paint brush is picked up. Sometimes, Stephen Peng can even create three works simultaneously with the inspiration and the works will lead him to demonstrate the due colors. He shares his brilliant life course generously with the viewers and also guides them to recall their initial dreams and expectations.
“I am interested in artistic creation, so I always paint happily and hope to pass the positive energy to viewers through my creation”. Stephen Peng had been engaged in the art world before the retirement and he is moving forward on the road of creation. His works are permeated with the passion and brightness praising the life. Only people with such profound life experience can have the magnificent mood. His works send out unwavering will and large-mindedness, which bring powerful inspiration to the viewers and remind people to lead and paint the life exclusive to oneself, as it is never too late to pursue for self-realization.
Satisfaction and joy is the portrayal of his current state of mind. Knowing Stephen Peng as a unique individual and his brilliant artistic talents, he is really living his life to the fullest.
