Lü Peng's exuberant - and subversive - engagement with Chinese culture has long been noted by critics, such as Li Xianting who observed how Lü Peng extracted "absurd humor and a perception of violence" from his juxtaposed "layering of cultural fragments". The truth of this assessment made in the heyday of Lü Peng's "red acrylic period" more than a decade ago is still evident in the more subdued and thoughtful ink works on paper presented in this show. Born in Beijing in 1967 and educated in the Department of Fine Arts at Capital Normal University and in the Chinese Painting Departments at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, from which he graduated in 2003, Lü Peng has successfully blended a career as a professional artist and teacher. Over the past two decades he has gained an international following, not only for his ink works, but also for his prints and acrylics, and his works are now included in collections not only in China, but also in Germany, the U.S.A., France, Australia, Austria, and Hong Kong. His facility to move between media has allowed him to shift the focus of his themes of cultural clash and confusion illustrated with historical, literary, theatrical, and pop-cultural themes. His recent works continue to focus on Lü Peng's leitmotif of the young – and ostensibly reserved - student intellectuals (an alter-ego of sorts), but his protagonists are no longer violently blind-sided by the impact of cultural clash. His youths now appear perplexed, as they attempt to clarify the world through books and conventional reading. These images underscore Lü Peng's long-standing fascination with the artistry of the Chinese book, print, and calligraphy, a fascination he shares with many leading artists of the contemporary period, including Xu Bing. For Lü Peng, this interest in the book goes back to his experimental years as part of the group called The Three Travel Weary Loafers. In 2015 Lü Peng's long-standing interest in the book culminated in an exhibition in Beijing titled subversively in English Forbidden Books, although its Chinese title was "Dushu Shidai", meaning "The Age of Reading". In these works, we encounter his young intellectuals contemplating the darker side of Chinese culture, examining volumes titled Jianghu Pian (The Rivers and Lakes), a term for the watery margins that lie beyond society's rational ordering, an underworld of sorts inhabited by gangsters and operators, a world outside the law, a world sometimes simply described as "out there". In these recent works, executed in an exquisite gongbi style, we see that Lü Peng has tempered the dramatic primary colors that characterized the heyday of his artistic theatricality. Five works related to the Forbidden Books series appear in this show. The work of 2014 simply titled The Boy (its fuller Chinese title being Youth, Rivers and Lakes) incorporates elements of traditional Chinese and Western culture (Renaissance landscape) theatrically framed by proscenium arch and curtains made of Chinese patterned silk. The naked young man is seated on a horse, behind a folding screen of the finest gauze silk with embroidered flowers and butterflies that demonstrate Lü Peng's virtuosity in his meticulous treatment of detail. In a second work titled Reading, we now see two naked young ladies, their faces shielded by the same book, covertly reading this forbidden tome beneath the lamp. They are seated on a weathered Chinese-style rock. The background curtains are now drawn to convey a heightened level of intimacy. A third work titled The Beauty and the General depicts a naked woman startled by the looming presence of the general in Chinese theatrical dress behind her but, like the protagonists in the previous two works, she is unable to divert her gaze from the page of the book that obscures her face from our gaze. The background landscape in this work, framed by opened curtains, is an ambiguous mixture of European Renaissance and Chinese elements. The earliest (2013) of Lü Peng's works in this show does not refer to books or the rivers and lakes but presents a theatrical setting evoking the Western Renaissance. Titled simply Chess, at the left of the work a naked woman is depicted; she is seated on a chessboard while a standing male Chinese figure and Chinese manikin occupy the right of the painting, but they seem disengaged from the figure at the left. In the work of 2015 titled Butterfly, we again see a landscape of rivers and lakes through opened curtains; now we see two figures clothed in traditional dress, one holding a Chinese painting brush, and the other an unfurling scroll painting, caught in a ray of light in which butterflies frolic. The addition of the leitmotif of the butterfly lends a romantic gentleness to any contemplation of the violent world "out there", from which his protagonists seem insulated, but also isolated, alone in their attempts to discover what is going on "out there". This could well serve as a comment for the current campaign against corruption in which secret investigations and trials are conducted but none of the workings of "out there" are revealed; or perhaps the artist is simply reminding us, through Zhuangzi's image of the butterfly, of the relativity of the human world when set against an ambivalent nature – the rivers and the streams.