Matilda Yueyang Peng

Matilda Yueyang Peng (b. 2000) graduated Summa Cum Laude from Tufts University’s combined degree program with a BA in English and Art History and a BFA in Fine Art from SMFA at Tufts. She is currently an MFA candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her practice investigates the space between language and the instability of the image, treating images not as stable endpoints, but as contingent and mutable entities. Harboring the desire to locate an initial moment, a first version, or a real referent, Peng seeks to expose the instability of such predispositions in processes of documentation, archiving, and reproduction. Within her work, the notion of the “original” is understood as a continuously deferred condition, something that is presumed, sought after, and operationalized, yet never fully attainable. Peng is also deeply concerned with the interplay between personal and intergenerational memory, history, and storytelling, where visual imagery functions as both a tool and a problem, a means of preservation that continually reveals its own limitations. Drawing on her background in poetry and the study of poetic imagery, her work attends to the symbolic gaps between what images promise to hold and what they inevitably fail to secure, the tension between the impulse to preserve and the structural impossibility of permanence. She has exhibited her work at the Griffin Museum of Photography (Winchester, MA, USA), Gallery 263 (Cambridge, MA, USA), Leica Gallery Boston, among others.