Keep in Touch, 2021

HD video and Super 8, 13’58”, color, sound.

January 20 –  February 19, 2023

Reminiscent of warm summers in South China and hot leather car seats baked by the blistering sun, sensual and yet distant, the opening scene of keep in touch (2021) introduces two men seeking to blow off steam. While they wait for the AC to cool down their car’s interior, repetitive beats underline the lingering awkwardness created by the men’s silence.

keep in touch was conceptualized as a five-channel video installation, but is presented online in a single-channel version for CARPARK. Arising from a single reel of Super 8 film and a brief prompt given to a group of friends, the work’s polemic tension emerges from a sense of being together-in-difference and brushes up against a fleeting, unstable solidarity. Punctuated by moments of silence, uneasy gossip, and coded bodily communication, the work considers the complexity of contact, touch, and the process of subjectification.

Peng Zuqiang works with associations and coincidences, often tracing the histories of failed attempts, whether at revolution or assassination, and thereby demonstrating his abiding interest in dislocated figures. Unmoored from time and space, such figures find themselves unable to become full subjects.

Peng’s works often begin as memories, souvenirs of the past, which he fictionalizes in order to approach history from a different angle. Focusing on frictions between body and language, his work proposes an alternative regime of visibility in which associative gestures, coincidences, and telling silences become the primary sources of meaning.

Peng Zuqiang’s keep in touch will be on view for the entirety of CARPARK, January 20 – February 19, on the exhibition’s website.