798 Avant Gallery is pleased to present Fairyland, a solo exhibition by the contemporary Chinese artist Lü Peng. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition at 798 Avant Gallery. Fairyland will showcase new paintings and ink works on papers that continue to explore and expand the visual territory of colliding cultures. A child of the Cultural Revolution and a native Beijinger, Lü Peng was born in 1967. He graduated from Beijing’s Capital Normal University in 1991 with a degree in fine art painting. In the mid nineties he gained international recognition as a founding member of the Three Travel Weary Loafers Group with Wei Dong and Liang Chang Sheng. In 2003 Lü Peng began working towards a doctorate in Chinese Painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Lü Peng’s new work in Fairyland continues to mine and intermingle the cultural symbols and iconography of traditional China and the modern world. These works typify the artist’s refined technical style and make evident his elevated level of intellectual scholarship. The waterfalls, trees, and mountains of traditional Chinese landscapes give way to checkerboard patterns and fleshy nudes. Characters from the Beijing Opera swirl into harmony with arrow wielding women wearing little more than ribbons. A man of the orient uses a set of modern binoculars to look over the shoulder of a naked woman holding only an ink brush. While these visual juxtapositions may stimulate a sense of temporary confusion, they are composed with such exquisite balance and grace that the chaos seems orderly in its place.