In Dog Nights, Chen Peng and Fan Wu present paintings and drawings from their respective practices, as well as two collaborative sculptures honoring Kara and Oke, the senior dogs that the artists adopted from Peng’s home country of Taiwan in 2022. The title of the exhibition is a nod to David Hockney’s 1995 exhibition Dog Days, in which the artist immortalized his two beloved dachshunds through dozens of drawings and paintings. Dog Nights, too, centers two dogs as its subjects, yet Peng and Wu’s images are unexpectedly intimate, a balance of clear-eyed observation and surreal fiction.

In Wu’s drawings, Kara and Oke appear sprawled amid dog beds, sheets, and scattered toys like celestial bodies, alternately pulling whatever artifacts-of-living that are nearest them into their unconscious orbits. What gravity does love hold, even in sleep? What power to bend and shape the fabric of space to draw others into proximity?

The drawings might appear sentimental, if they weren’t so frank. There’s an honesty and clarity to ink: An unforgiving medium, and mistakes and false-starts sit comfortably alongside more resolved passages. Each of these sketches, completed over a period of 60 days, appears labelled with its date, and while the subject matter remains relatively constrained, there is a sense that Wu’s routine – a conscious commitment to return and reengage with his sleeping dogs as subjects – reflects the cumulative nature of the love that grows through caregiving’s often mundane routines.

While Peng also centers Kara and Oke as subjects within her paintings, the images shed any hints of the man-made or the domestic. As Kara and Oke shift between states of sleep and wakefulness, they hover unanchored from their beds, resting both within and outside of surrounding landscapes. Luminous fields take the place of Wu’s interior spaces, yet an other-worldly light suggests that they do not belong to any physical realm. Instead, the landscapes carry the ethereal quality of spaces that Kara and Oke contain within themselves – outside of linear time, durational at the scale of seasons.

As Peng suggests, dogs live in our homes, yet maintain a greater purity and closeness to nature than we do. Here, time expands, or pauses – becomes a container. I’m reminded of the shortness of dogs’ lives, and how we occupy the whole of their lived experiences, while they live (unknowingly) within only fragments of ours.

The difference between fiction and documentary is that fiction can be more real – a clarity of feeling and experience in its conscious refinement. Love, like fiction, compresses and expands time in its embodied narratives. In Dog Nights, Peng and Wu’s images of their dogs complement each other as narratives of love, an experience that is both immediate and atemporal.

- Jason Lipow

Photo by Garrett Carroll