Skip to main content

Keep in Touch

Peng Zuqiang

2020 00:13:58 ChinaChineseColorStereo16:9HD video
Tags:

Description

Emerging from one reel of Super 8 film and a brief prompt given to a group of friends, Keep in Touch gestures a sense of being together-in-difference that brushes against the fleeting, unstable solidarity. Fragmented with moments of silence, uneasy gossip, and coded bodily communication, the work consider the complexity of contact, touch and becoming a subject.

In the first scene, two men stand outside of a car, waiting for the air conditioner to cool down the vehicle. As one puts on some house music using the car’s CD player, their silence is broken into a state of indescribable feelings. In the second scene, shot on Super 8 film, a person tries to recount a story whiling spinning a pen around in his hand. As he narrates the story which he cannot fully remember, he ponders this unusual amnesia. In the third scene, also filmed on Super 8, focuses on two pairs of hands cutting each other’s nails, the caring yet sensitive gesture were echoed by the intertitles. The fourth scene features a woman standing in a forest putting tiger balm on her body. And in the last scene, two people are playing cat's cradles, while two voices exchanges stories of inexplicable gestural encounters with other queer bodies.

About Peng Zuqiang

Peng Zuqiang works with film, video and installations. Recent exhibitions and screenings include Cell Project Space, E-Flux screening room, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Times Museum, UCCA Beijing, 25FPS, IDFA, Antimatter, and Open City Doc Festival. He is the recipient of the Present Future Prize 2022, and a ‘Special Mention’ from Festival Film Dokumenter, Yogyakarta for his first feature film, Nan (2020). A resident artist at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (2022-2024), he lives and works in Amsterdam.

photo by Sander van Wettum, 2023