The Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai presents Chinese artist Peng Zuqiang’s first institutional solo exhibition in Asia: Short-term Histories. Primarily a moving image artist, Peng explores the history of media and affect in an experimental practice. He pieces together narrative fragments through elusive emotions, plumbing obscure histories and rearranging equivocal carriers of memory to challenge the linear narratives of time-based media.

The exhibition is composed of three film installations and one chromogenic print. Two of the videos, the single-channel The Cyan Garden (2022) and the newly commissioned three-channel installation Afternoon Hearsay (2025), particularly respond to the improvisation and abrupt fractures of media histories. In The Cyan Garden, the artist fictionalizes history of an underground radio station, drawing fragments from his home province of Hunan, a friend’s Southeast Asian-style Airbnb, and a hotel where rumored revolutionaries briefly stayed. The clandestine radio station Voice of the Malayan Revolution operated out of Yiyang, in Hunan Province, from 1969 to 1981. Almost concurrently, a unique 8.75 mm film format was widely used for mobile film screenings in rural China. In Afternoon Hearsay, the artist presents a “a site of memory” for resistance to historical amnesia. He juxtaposed hand printed archival 8.75 mm films with footage shot on Super 8 to assemble a disjointed narrative that extends from the invention of this specific film format to the now-unrecognizable film printing factories, as well as mobile projections in the countryside, border lands and other rural regions. In media studies, 8.75 mm film is often regarded as a state-led production tool. Peng focuses instead on the resistant rhetoric of the media itself, thereby reflecting on the limitations of history and the inaccessibility of archives.

The film stock is experimental by nature: in its inception, the 8.75 mm standard had no corresponding camera, and its circulation for screenings in remote areas relied on a process of reduction printing from other film format copies. In other words, since 8.75 mm film could not produce new visual memories through filming, it can be seen as a “cameraless” medium resisting production.

But what contemporary meaning do cameraless images possess? Peng reflects on the power structures and violence hidden in the production and diffusion of images, and returns to their photochemical form. The piece the viewer sees upon entering is Déjà vu (2023–2024), the artist’s first complete use of photogram techniques: he directly exposed a 30-meter- long metal wire onto 16 mm film. The process of photogram was further experimented within Afternoon Hearsay, where he exposed 8.75 mm archival film reels on 16 mm and 35 mm color print stock. With controls in light, color and chemicals to manually bring out a shifting, abstract imagery. “Fire” is another central element in Peng’s visual rhetoric—burning untouchable yet spreading emotions. In Untitled (Second Press) (2025), the artist transforms a frame of film reels which was damaged during projection by an overheated lightbulb and mishandling into a chromogenic print. In Afternoon Hearsay, moving images of burning and tearing interact with an accident of a fire narrated in the voice-over, becoming a metaphor for the intimacy and provocation of film itself as an affective medium. Today, memories of mobile film screenings are gradually fading, yet the hidden emotions and dissenting rumors left outside official records find a connection in Peng’s exhibition.

Curated by Sam Shiyi Qian, with the support of Pan Zhen.