Lijiao Peng
Lijiao Peng is a multidisciplinary artist working across mixed media, oil painting, and textile art. Currently pursuing an MA at the Royal College of Art, she previously graduated from the China Academy of Art in 2021. Her work brings together classical painting, abstract symbols, color, and material experimentation to examine identity, multiculturalism, historical memory, and time.
Peng’s practice is shaped by her background in a Miao minority family. From an early age, she encountered embroidery patterns, ceremonial objects, and oral traditions that carried cultural histories outside dominant written narratives. At the same time, frequent family relocations meant that place was never stable. This combination of cultural inheritance and geographic movement continues to inform her work.
Rather than presenting identity as unified or fixed, Peng treats it as layered. Her paintings and mixed-media works consider what remains when a person moves between places and cultural systems, and how memory can persist even when an external sense of belonging is unsettled.
Formal education gave Peng a foundation in classical technique while encouraging her to move beyond it. She combines portraiture with contemporary abstraction, using that relationship to stage exchanges between cultural traditions, historical references, and different ways of seeing the self.
Her Meditation series is one example. The figures in these works are presented in a state of reflection, with color and abstract elements used to establish an atmosphere of calm and concentration. While the series is concerned with inner peace, it is also part of a broader exploration of how subjective experience can be represented without becoming literal or fixed.
Eastern Taoist philosophy is an important influence, particularly its understanding of time as nonlinear. Peng is interested in the idea that past, present, and future do not exist as isolated stages, but overlap within lived experience. This view of time shapes both the conceptual structure and visual composition of the work.
She uses shifts in color, form, and symbolic imagery to suggest multiple temporal states at once. A portrait may refer to the past while remaining anchored in the present; an abstract form may function as a record of memory, a projection of the future, or an unresolved condition between the two.
Hilma af Klint, Olafur Eliasson, and Xu Bing are significant influences. From af Klint, Peng draws an understanding of abstraction as a language capable of addressing ideas beyond formal design. Eliasson’s work has shaped her interest in perception, atmosphere, impermanence, and the body’s encounter with space. Xu Bing’s engagement with language and translation resonates with her experience of moving across cultural systems, where meanings may remain partial or in transition.
These influences are not simply stylistic references. They support Peng’s broader concern with how consciousness, place, time, and cultural identity can be addressed through art without being reduced to one interpretation.
Her future work will move further toward composite materials, including textiles, organic matter, and process-based elements. She is developing a new project focused on uncertainty as both a material condition and a philosophical position. The work will explore how unstable materials and open-ended methods can reflect processes of beginning, dissolution, and persistence.
This shift also changes the role of control in her practice. Rather than fully determining the outcome in advance, Peng is interested in creating conditions in which forms can emerge through material behavior and process. The artist remains responsible for the work’s structure, but allows for outcomes that cannot be entirely predicted.
Peng’s advice to younger artists is to remain close to the questions that genuinely matter to them, rather than adopting a marketable identity too quickly. Technical skill, she believes, should support sustained inquiry. Her own practice is grounded in that principle: using painting, abstraction, textile processes, and philosophical research to examine the contradictions that shape experience across cultures and time.
