Lo Chan Peng is a Taiwanese artist much watched of late on the international stage; in 2013–2014 he took part in numerous group shows and art fairs in Cornell and Los Angeles in the United States and in London, his singular realist style shining in international art circles. He holds firmly to his work, its subjects bound up time and again with the history, politics and culture of Taiwan — the Ashen Face series, for instance, depicts the anxious, uneasy state of mind of Taiwanese people in recent years.

In 2015, Mayday’s concept album “herstory with Mayday” invited Lo to paint its main visual. That same year, his work was chosen as the sole large promotional banner for a group exhibition at Cornell University’s Johnson Museum of Art, hung upon the museum building itself.

In Lo’s own words: “I have painted portraits of many different faces, yet I feel that all my life I have been painting one and the same work — I am searching for the face that ‘gazes, together with the viewer, at the body of air before us.’ It is an air beyond all naming, yet within that abstract emptiness are folded so many things of the human world: helplessness, joy, fear, jealousy, anger, love and hate. I believe deeply that, given enough energy and time and painstaking devotion, an artist can seal his own soul into the canvas. To make art a means of confirming one’s own existence may, on reflection, seem a sad thing; but to let one’s own colour grow only thicker and deeper — that colour is very beautiful, a hue that belongs to oneself alone. It is for this beauty alone that I hope to create.”