In El Segundo, Los Angeles, stands a private museum, ESMoA (the El Segundo Museum of Art), founded by the collector couple Brian and Eva Sweeney. Its holdings range from Impressionism to the contemporary, and it regularly invites curators to build exhibitions around the collection; the Los Angeles Times once called it an experimental museum that breaks with traditional norms.
From 12 May to 25 August 2013, ESMoA held “EXPERIENCE03: TRUTH,” thirty-seven paintings and sculptures of the human figure and the portrait, threading together how people across the centuries have understood — and feared — the “real.” The makers ranged from Albrecht Dürer in the fifteenth century, through Mucha, Klimt and Picasso in the nineteenth, to Martin Kippenberger in the twentieth; a great gathering of masters from Western art history. Lo Chan Peng was the only Asian artist invited, and his 2013 oil Ashen Face — Fog Walker was the youngest contemporary work on view; born in 1983, he was also the youngest artist in the show.
Rather than divide the works by era or by the standing of their makers, the curator threaded the dialogue of these (semi-)nude figures by intuition. Lo’s work was set quietly beside a finely wrought print by Franz von Stuck — a kindred black-and-white tonality, an equally enigmatic young woman — and next to the female nudes drawn by Picasso and Klimt, a mutual reflection across time and beyond the line dividing East and West.
David Brafman, associate curator at the Getty Museum, said: “The moment I saw Lo Chan Peng’s work I was completely bewildered — was it photography or painting? Only in those exquisite passages of skin did I find the answer: pure photographic realism.” Lee Hendrix, the Getty’s curator of drawings, said his work became the centre of the exhibition: “It is like a window, opening my imagination and curiosity about Taiwanese contemporary art.” ESMoA’s director and a great collector, Brian Sweeney, remarked: “Lo Chan Peng’s work is like a film. He has created a style that belongs to Taiwan alone — you will never see another Lo Chan Peng.” A single pallid Taiwanese face had stirred the international art world’s curiosity about, and study of, Taiwanese contemporary art.
