Paul Peng.

ALT My Subject—Exhibition Statement: Any representational artist must contend with what it means for their art to be both real and not real, but this question gains a fraught edge for those artists who draw less from their observations—how the real world actually affects them—and more from their desires—how they want the real world to affect them instead. In My Subject, Paul Peng insists that his desires already exist in the real world: as real drawings and real pictures, brought about by his singularly intensive approach to improvising and rendering scenes from simple pencil and paper. Described by the artist as “drawings of monster boys in situations” and contextualized through the folk art of furry subcultures and cartoon fandoms, the works in this exhibition aim to honor their picturehood as the real look that happens when something looks at something else, even when those somethings themselves do not exist in the real world.