Wang Peng

For his 1993 Wall, Wang Peng built a solid brick barrier at a gallery entrance. This, the one and only piece of work in the show, put him in the midst of China's tense cultural and political atmosphere, and the gallerist, under pressure, asked him to remove it a day later. Wang Peng, who was born in the 1960s, migrated to the States in the mid-90s, but returned to China again in 2000. His performance-based happenings have included locking his audience in an exhibition space without warning and taking up residence in a pavilion by the moat of the Forbidden City in Beijing. His photographs have featured images of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Chairman Mao as well as Tiananmen Square. Here, in response to the figurative tyranny of the scientific method, he's fragmented male and female nudes, inserting slivers of each into test tubes lit from behind, and lined them up on the walls of the exhibition space, preserved and showcased as samples in a lab.