(China Times / report by Wu Yin-hui, Taipei) Image after image of a weeping young woman, their helpless expressions reflecting the inner condition of Taiwan’s younger generation. In his solo exhibition “The Edge of Darkness” at AKI Gallery, Lo Chan Peng presents more than a dozen works of consummate realist technique. The figures’ pallid faces are veiled in a black, mist-like atmosphere; through these “Ashen Face” portraits the artist gives form to the “insecurity and anxiety” suffusing Taiwanese society.

A graduate of the Western Painting programme at the National Taiwan Normal University Graduate Institute of Fine Arts, Lo rose to prominence with his hyper-realist portraiture and won the Kaohsiung Art Award in 2008. In 2009 his first solo show, “Strawberry Generation Studio Invasion,” answered the “strawberry generation” label pinned on the young with a palette of youthful pink.

After nearly four years’ reflection, “The Edge of Darkness” strips away the loud costumes and colours and turns instead to the pale, almost morbid figure of the “Ashen Face.” Set off by black and silver, the wan flesh — with its scent of decay — grows only more vivid, down to the pores of the skin and the capillaries beneath. “In the end what I want to stress is that atmosphere,” Lo says, “the shape the people of Taiwan have taken under a tangled web of history, politics and culture — a chaotic, peculiar dissonance one hardly knows how to put into words.”