CHI PENG: Trading Pain
Swapping Made in China – Made in Hungary

Visitors to the Ludwig Museum may encounter a veritable “Chinese market” on the third floor between 26 May and 3 June 2007. Chi Peng, a young Chinese photo-artist in Budapest within the framework of a residency programme, thanks to the Peter and Irene Ludwig Foundation in Aachen, has become sad (just like the Monkey King) in the course of his journeys in the West that Chinese markets across Europe have been inundated with “tacky”. And so he resolved to create a market based on reciprocal barter. He has printed one of the sheets of his photo series, Sprinting Forward, in one thousand exemplars, on paper of superior quality, which he had transported from Beijing to Budapest. This is exactly the same route along which others – painfully to Chi Peng – transport shoddy goods. The visitor will be able to exchange the A/4-format colour sheets (Made in China), in a numbered edition, clipped to a line along the wall and exhibited for a week on the third floor of the Ludwig Museum, for their own drawing they have brought with them, or photograph, or any small object (Made in Hungary). In this way, anyone who takes part in the action can become a part of the spiritual advancement of Chinese–Hungarian trade.

Chi Peng (1981, Yantai, China) graduated from the Digital Media Department of the Beijing Academy of Fine Arts in 2005. Veronika Baksa-Soós, curator at the Ludwig Museum Budapest, also took notice of the achievements of the then final-year student, and invited him to Budapest. In the two years since, Chi Peng has taken part in numerous exhibitions around the world. The artist is currently represented by Alexander Ochs Galleries in Berlin and Beijing, as well as White Space Gallery in Beijing. He was also included in the large-scale exhibition in 2006 at the Essl Museum in Vienna, entitled China Avant-garde, with three of his large-scale images then acquired for the collection. His most recent photographic series systematically treats the chapters of the legendary classical Chinese epic novel, Journey to the West, or The Story of the Monkey King. Chi Peng draws on the parallels in his own life story, and he transplants the Chinese “Johnny Grain-o’-Corn” into our age, in his story of Sun Wu-kong. It will not be “John Valiant” who is the hero of Wu Cheng’en’s epic, finally, but he will be glorified as a Bodhisattva after countless tribulations. (These new images were published recently in a special album, with a cover of fake monkey fur, entitled Chi Peng’s Journey to the West.)

Chi Peng will present this work as well as his earlier photo series within the framework of the May edition of the lumú 10–10 programme. Tibor Várnagy will be in conversation with the artist, as the guest of the IS-IS rendezvous, on 26 May 2007, from 5 p.m.