‘Afternoon Hearsay’, the first solo exhibition by Peng Zuqiang in Scotland, centres on a new three-channel film installation of the same name, co-commissioned by The Common Guild and the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. 

The film, ‘Afternoon Hearsay’ (2025), is concerned with the nature of image-making and the ways in which cultural, historical and political narratives are shared and disseminated. It evokes a partial history of 8.75mm film stock: a film format unique to China, manufactured between the 1960s and 1980s. 

A lightweight, portable film, exactly one quarter the width of 35mm stock, 8.75mm was used as a projection medium around remote and rural regions where mobile projection units (makeshift cinemas) brought educational and propogandist entertainment to communities beyond the city. A dedicated camera device was never created for the 8.75mm film, instead, this format relied on transfers from 35mm film, 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’ 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. 

Accompanying ‘Afternoon Hearsay’ is ‘Déjà Vu’ (2023), an installation combining 16mm film projection, text, sound, and a small clay sculpture; ‘Autocorrects’ (2023), a video installation that plays with the format of a pop music video; and a new chromatic photographic print, ‘Untitled (second press #2)’ (2025).

Text and curated by Chloe Reith