Extraordinary flower-landscapes from Peng Kanglong

The Extraordinary Flower-Landscapes exhibition of Peng Kanglong Photo: Courtesy of the exhibition

China's classically-trained flower and landscape painter Peng Kanglong's first solo exhibition is being displayed in INK studio in Beijing. 

Throughout the long history of Chinese brush and ink painting, landscape and flower paintings have been two distinct genres with their own metaphoric languages, painting techniques, representative masters and developmental histories. But Peng explores the artistic possibilities of integrating these once separate genres.

Starting with his foundation in Chinese brush and ink painting, Peng soon developed a highly personal landscape-painting style that integrated the brushwork of late-Ming-early-Qing individualists such as Shitao (1642-1707) and Kuncan (1612 to 1674) with the density and weight of the Modernist master of the landscape genre Huang Binhong. Peng's style-raw, bitter, and at times astringent-was individualistic and uncompromising and often at odds with the prevailing orthodox taste of collectors shaped by the Qing Imperial Collection housed in the Taipei Palace Museum.

In the current exhibition Grand Synthesis, INK studio will feature eight more monumental works in this latest phase of Peng's ongoing synthesis of the landscape and flower genres including two enormously long handscrolls Speak and Act Cautiously (2020) and Contained Virtues (2020), the monumental hanging scroll Ode to the Mighty Peak (2022), and the two monumental horizontal scrolls Mountain Flower Romance (2023) and Glistening Dew (2023).

Global Times