The Deluge – Noah’s Ark

source: whiterabbitcollectionorg

“Art should be a tool of propaganda, a tool to awaken the collective conscience.”

Born Taipei, Taiwan, 1969. Lives and works in Taipei and Beijing

Peng Hung-Chih describes himself as an intellectual who uses art “to criticise society”. His favourite approach is to fuse opposing concepts into a single, jarring whole. One of his best-known works, Both Died of the Nanjing Massacre (2009) depicts the head and chest of Japanese General Tojo Hideki joined to the lower body of one of the 20,000 Chinese women raped by Japanese troops in 1937. (In fact, Tojo was executed for war crimes unrelated to that atrocity; he was in Manchuria when it occurred.) In Farfur the Martyr (2009), Peng Hung-Chih creates a similar clash by joining the body of the crucified Jesus Christ and the head of Farfur, a Mickey Mouse clone who hosted a children’s TV show broadcast by the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas. The artist observes that in the figure of Farfur, who was murdered on the show by an Israeli, the quintessentially American Mickey Mouse “becomes a tool for anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiments.” Such inversions of meaning and intent, in his view, “can be seen as a real-life theatre of the absurd.”