Peng Yi-hang is a contemporary artist who specializes in conceptual photography. His work explores the essence of the photographic medium, spiritual beliefs and local cultural phenomena. He creates images that challenge perception and make the invisible visible.
His artistic practice began with the Midnight Stroll series, a meditative nocturnal photo series that later developed into his Ghost Park series. Over the course of six years, he collected animal statues throughout Taiwan, photographed them with large-format cameras and long exposure times and illuminated them at night with flashlights to breathe ghostly life into them – capturing scenes that remain hidden to the naked eye. In Ghost in the Shell, he shows museum exhibits of traditional Taiwanese glove puppets in their backstage state, revealing their hidden existence before the performance.
The series Noise is an experiment in lightless photography: digital cameras are placed in closed boxes, overheat and generate random signal interference – an exploration of the question of whether photography is possible without light. Picnic and Thanks God reflect his observations of artificial nature and Taiwanese folk beliefs: the former examines landscape simulations and feng shui elements in commercial spaces, the latter documents bearers of so-called “spirit chairs” whose bodies bear the traces of years of religious devotion.
During his international residencies, he extended his observations to social and cultural phenomena – for example in the series The Wall, which shows precisely trimmed, high hedges in front of German villas: symbols of privacy and a pronounced sense of order.