Hong Kong | Peng Kanglong: Losing My Way to Watch the Flowers Bloom

INKstudio Hong Kong is pleased to present Losing My Way to Watch the Flowers Bloom, the latest solo exhibition by Peng Kanglong — one of the leading contemporary ink artists and a rare 集大成者 (jidachengzhe, a “great synthesizer”) of the brush-and-ink tradition — on view from September 19 through November 28, 2026. The exhibition brings together significant works from across Peng’s career, including key works previously presented in his major 2025 solo exhibitions Peng Kanglong: Beguiling the Eye at the Guangdong Museum of Art and (In/Ex)haling the Vast Wilderness at The Historical Grand Courtyard in Taipei. Nearly 40 works highlight the development of Peng’s ink practice across different stages of his career.

Throughout the history of Chinese brush-and-ink painting, landscape and flower painting have been two distinct genres, each with its own metaphoric language, techniques, representative masters, and developmental history. Peng Kanglong graduated from the Taipei National University of the Arts in 1988 with a focus on Chinese brush and ink painting, specializing in landscape. Drawing on the brushwork of late-Ming and early-Qing masters such as Shitao (1642–1707) and Kuncan (1612–after 1674), as well as the dense, layered quality of the modern master Huang Binhong’s (1865–1955) landscapes, Peng gradually developed a distinctive landscape style of his own. In 2013, he began experimenting with flower painting, opening a new line of inquiry into the relationships between form and brushwork, composition and space, and color and light. Whereas Huang Binhong’s breakthrough employed the brushwork of flower painting to transform landscape painting, Peng works in the reverse direction — employing the fine texture strokes and expansive compositional depth of landscape painting to render his extraordinary flowers. 

The exhibition will be presented in two rotations: the first from September 19 to October 21, 2026, and the second from October 22 to November 28, 2026. Featured works include the eleven-meter-long ink handscroll Roaming No. 3, the silver-foil folding screen Silver Thunderbolt, classic ink monochromes such as Mahler’s Fifth, Drawing Out, and Spirit on the Branch, and signature flower-landscape works including Night Flowers at Dawn, Flowers of Evil 2-1, New Life, and Rejuvenation. Bringing together works from different periods in a range of scales, materials, and formats, the exhibition reveals the richness and diversity of Peng’s evolving painterly language. 

The exhibition title, “Losing My Way to Watch the Flowers Bloom,” reflects Peng’s approach to painting as a process of continuous exploration. Rather than beginning with a predetermined image, he allows the painting to unfold through the movement of brush and ink. Landscape and flowers are thus no longer merely subjects of representation but pathways into exploring the possibilities of brush and ink. Between form and suggestion, density and lightness, dryness and wetness, vitality continually emerges and transforms beneath his brush, gradually unfolding into a painterly world distinctly his own.