Peng Ke

Peng Ke

China

 

Born in 1992 in Changsha, Hunan Province, and raised in Shenzhen, Peng Ke is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design with a degree in photography and is an image worker and writer. She is currently living and working in Shanghai and Los Angeles. She believes in the power dynamics of the stationary action “looking”, and in the all-encompassing and freeing language of images. She is the recipient of the Abigail Cohen Fellowship in Documentary Photography, a joint initiative of Magnum Foundation and Asia Society’s ChinaFil, the winner of the EMGdotART Foundation Award, the Hahnemühle New Talent, nominee for the Huayu Youth Award, the Paul Huf Award at the Foam Museum of Photography in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and the Jimei × Arles Discovery Award. She held solo exhibitions at Salt Projects, Gallery Vacancy (Shanghai) and the Lianzhou Museum of Photography. She has worked as a resident artist at the Woodstock Center for Photography, ACRE (Chicago) and The Lighthouse Works (New York).



The Protagonist Variable size Video, textile 2022 After visiting the production area of the Misai Silk Factory, the artist received intuitive, instinctive and sensual stimuli. The steam-filled workshops produce a primordial vitality in the rainy weather which characterizes the late winter and early spring — the smell of cocoons is tinged with the smell of animal carcasses and the saltiness of seawater. The large industrial machinery echoes the slender movements of the women workers, the tiny organic life of the cocoons continuing to operate in a cold, rigid programmed action of a machine like a vast interwoven heterogeneous life form. The Protagonist is a semi-fictional narrative single-frequency video, with clips in the form of field documentaries and mockumentaries. Through visits and filming, the artist produced a series of social field documentaries of production sites including bamboo weaving and silk weaving factories in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai, such as the filming of the century-old silk factory in Misai, fwhich eatures how the cocoons are fabricated into silk in the workshops; and the making of jewellery for the women workers in the workshops, to be given to them to wear during their labours. The film is interspersed with a series of semi-fictional interviews with the “protagonists” dressed in cocoons. They share their own travails, comforts, tasks and the meaning of their labour as cocoon-like people in a collective society.
The Protagonist Variable size Video, textile 2022 After visiting the production area of the Misai Silk Factory, the artist received intuitive, instinctive and sensual stimuli. The steam-filled workshops produce a primordial vitality in the rainy weather which characterizes the late winter and early spring — the smell of cocoons is tinged with the smell of animal carcasses and the saltiness of seawater. The large industrial machinery echoes the slender movements of the women workers, the tiny organic life of the cocoons continuing to operate in a cold, rigid programmed action of a machine like a vast interwoven heterogeneous life form. The Protagonist is a semi-fictional narrative single-frequency video, with clips in the form of field documentaries and mockumentaries. Through visits and filming, the artist produced a series of social field documentaries of production sites including bamboo weaving and silk weaving factories in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai, such as the filming of the century-old silk factory in Misai, fwhich eatures how the cocoons are fabricated into silk in the workshops; and the making of jewellery for the women workers in the workshops, to be given to them to wear during their labours. The film is interspersed with a series of semi-fictional interviews with the “protagonists” dressed in cocoons. They share their own travails, comforts, tasks and the meaning of their labour as cocoon-like people in a collective society.
The Protagonist Variable size Video, textile 2022 After visiting the production area of the Misai Silk Factory, the artist received intuitive, instinctive and sensual stimuli. The steam-filled workshops produce a primordial vitality in the rainy weather which characterizes the late winter and early spring — the smell of cocoons is tinged with the smell of animal carcasses and the saltiness of seawater. The large industrial machinery echoes the slender movements of the women workers, the tiny organic life of the cocoons continuing to operate in a cold, rigid programmed action of a machine like a vast interwoven heterogeneous life form. The Protagonist is a semi-fictional narrative single-frequency video, with clips in the form of field documentaries and mockumentaries. Through visits and filming, the artist produced a series of social field documentaries of production sites including bamboo weaving and silk weaving factories in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai, such as the filming of the century-old silk factory in Misai, fwhich eatures how the cocoons are fabricated into silk in the workshops; and the making of jewellery for the women workers in the workshops, to be given to them to wear during their labours. The film is interspersed with a series of semi-fictional interviews with the “protagonists” dressed in cocoons. They share their own travails, comforts, tasks and the meaning of their labour as cocoon-like people in a collective society.
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