Afternoon Hearsay

Peng Zuqiang

The Common Guild

11/10/2025 - 07/12/2025

Peng Zuqiang, Afternoon Hearsay, 2025. Installation view, The Common Guild, Glasgow, 2025. Commissioned by The Common Guild, Glasgow and the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. Courtesy of the artist and Antenna Space.

Peng Zuqiang, Afternoon Hearsay, 2025 (film still). Super 8mm, 16mm and 35mm transferred to digital, with 5.1 surround sound. Commissioned by The Common Guild, Glasgow and the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. Courtesy of the artist and Antenna Space.

Peng Zuqiang, Déjà vu, 2023. Installation view, The Common Guild, Glasgow, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Antenna Space.

Peng Zuqiang, Déjà vu, 2023. Installation view, The Common Guild, Glasgow, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Antenna Space.

Peng Zuqiang, Untitled (second press #2), 2025. C-print. Courtesy of the artist and Antenna Space.

Peng Zuqiang, Autocorrects, 2023. Installation view, The Common Guild, Glasgow, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Antenna Space.

Afternoon Hearsay
Peng Zuqiang
The Common Guild
11.10 – 07.12.2025

Afternoon Hearsay is the first solo exhibition by Peng Zuqiang in Scotland and first institutional show by the artist in the UK. At the centre of this exhibition is a new three-channel film installation of the same name, co-commissioned by The Common Guild, Glasgow and the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, with support from the British Council’s Connections Through Culture grant programme.

Afternoon Hearsay is pieced together from hearsay, rumour and the imagination. It is as much a story of alternative cinema spaces as a record of significant places and people erased by history and rapid change. Through his research and meditations on cameraless image-making and photochemical abstraction, Peng reflects on the violence, tragedy and suppression of truthful image circulation.

The work is concerned with the nature of image-making and the ways in which cultural, historical and political narratives are shared and disseminated. Afternoon Hearsay evokes a partial history of 8.75mm film stock: a film format unique to China, manufactured between the 1960s and 1980s and used as a projection medium to display educational and propagandist entertainment in remote and rural communities via mobile projection units (traveling cinemas). A dedicated camera device was never created for the 8.75mm film, instead, this format relied on transfers from 35mm film. Without a camera, no original footage could be shot, raising the central question of Peng’s work: What is a film without a camera?

Cameraless filmmaking techniques and legacies of structural filmmaking are at the centre of Afternoon Hearsay. Archival 8.75mm prints are photogrammed onto 16mm and 35mm colour negative print stock and woven together with contemporary Super 8 footage shot by Peng. By doing so, Peng creates images of film strips that merge, burn, and tear through chromatic space. Interlayered and overlapping images coalesce with fragments of optical sound and narratives from unnamed interlocutors. The installation conjures an ambiguous and expansive temporal space in which the boundaries of fact and fiction are indistinguishable and immaterial, whilst the solidity of memory is foregrounded through the sensorial materiality of film.

Afternoon Hearsay will be accompanied by new chromatic print Untitled (second press #2) (2025) and Déjà Vu (2023), an installation combining 16mm film projection, text, sound, and a small clay sculpture. Déjà Vu is a one-to-one photogram, another image made without a camera, by exposing 30 metres of metal wire, commonly used by emergency services and rescue operations, directly onto 30 metres of black and white negative print film. The work meditates on the sanctioned and spontaneous violence enacted on bodies; physical injury and harm experienced first-hand, or else overheard, observed and shared by communities. The abstract imagery is soundtracked by a rhythmical beat derived from protest chants.

Peng Zuqiang (b. 1992, Changsha, China) works with film, video and installation. Recent solo presentations include Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2023); Kevin Space, Vienna (2023); Cell Project Space, London (2022); E-Flux screening room, New York (2022); and Antenna-Tenna, Shanghai (2021). Group exhibitions and screenings include UCCA Beijing (2024); Times Museum, Guangzhou (2024); 22nd Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil, São Paulo (2023); The Physics Room, Christchurch (2023); CCA Berlin (2023); Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Hawick, UK (2022) Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany (2022); OCAT x KADIST Emerging Media Artist Program, OCAT, Shanghai (2022); Macalline Art Center (MACA), Beijing (2022); Times Art Center, Berlin (2021); and the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (2020).

Peng graduated from the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam in 2024, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017 and Goldsmiths, University of London in 2014. He is a recipient of the Present Future Prize at Artissima (2022), and the Dialog Award from EMAF Osnabrück (2023–24). Residencies and fellowships include Art Explora, Paris; Skowhegan, Maine; and the Core Program, Texas. He lives and works in between Amsterdam and Paris.

Photo credit: Ruth Clark.