AGE: 35
BASED IN: New York
Peggy Chiang practices a surreal form of stagecraft, transforming the most mundane objects into uncanny works of art. Her creations inhabit strange and mysterious places: For Halcyon Lunch (No. 2), 2018, Chiang constructed a tiny, luminous bamboo forest inside a Coca-Cola can. A ceiling fan in the woods, a motorized piece made during a 2022 Skowhegan residency, spun slowly while suspended among the trees that populate the legendary school’s campus.
Contrary to the safer preferences of the art market, Chiang makes beguiling, sometimes ephemeral, and often conceptually opaque sculpture—a practice that was nurtured by formative years spent in Baltimore’s experimental arts community. But she moved to New York this summer following her first solo show with dealer Laurel Gitlen, who found a ceiling fan in the woods “poetic, but tough.” Chiang presented just one sculpture in the gallery’s Lower East Side space: Toss in the asphalt, 2023, a garbage truck’s rusty maw accompanied by the sounds of clamoring machinery, muffled shouting, and the slightest hint of classical music.
“The way Peggy animates her work—with movement, sound, evaporation, reflection—is a psychic indicator of time and impermanence,” adds Gitlen. The show also included a bundle of incense, marking time with its slow trickle of ash and smoke, burning within a cigarette propped among the brown, crunchy leaves scattered across the gallery floor.
Recently, Chiang made Forming, 2024, a constellation of takeout boxes perched on stained tablecloths, with lids made to look perpetually fogged with steam. The boxes conjure a phantom restaurant that exists only inside the artist’s mind. But rather than elucidate the intention behind her works with detailed explanations, the artist prefers to leave room for mystery. “I would rather present little crumbs of information,” she says.
Viewers will have to rely on their own imaginations to fill in the rest.
