Peng Zuqiang

During his residency at the Santozeum, Peng Zuqiang worked on new projects for his solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Zurich, opening June 2027.

Peng works with film, video and installations, often using analog or obsolete formats to tell quiet, personal stories about memory and history. His films move slowly and don’t explain themselves — they leave room for feeling and associations.

Peng (b. 1992, Changsha, China) lives and works in Paris. He studied at Goldsmiths, University of London, and later at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Much of his work grows out of forgotten or short-lived film technologies — an obscure 8.75mm format once used for mobile film screenings in rural China, an underground radio station, a roll of 16mm film exposed by hand in the dark. In Déjà Vu, he ran a length of metal wire directly across film stock rather than shooting through a lens, describing the resulting image as capturing “just a bodily sensation, not a real memory.”

His recent exhibitions include Short-term Histories, his first institutional solo show in Asia, at Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, and Afternoon Hearsay at The Common Guild in Scotland. He has also shown at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, and is represented by Antenna Space.

At Santozeum, Peng continued this same research into memory and material, developing the work he will present in Zurich.