Aslan Goisum and Peng Zuqiang Challenge Authoritarianism
In a joint exhibition at Emalin, London, the artists’ films and photographs attest to the impact of state censorship and regulation
In a joint exhibition at Emalin, London, the artists’ films and photographs attest to the impact of state censorship and regulation

In ‘Evidence’, Aslan Goisum and Peng Zuqiang present works that indirectly attest to the impact of state censorship and regulation. Goisum, an artist from Grozny whose previous works include videos and installations interrogating Russian colonial legacies, has moved into photography in this exhibition, showing four images that range from a portrait of an unnamed person to a shot of an empty room. These are displayed alongside Peng’s film installations, such as Déjà vu (2023) – a small sculpture, a short film and a sound piece about false memories that obliquely addresses the protests against the Chinese government’s COVID-19 restrictions after a building fire in Ürümqi in November 2022 killed ten people, raising questions about whether lockdown protocols had prevented evacuation or effective firefighting.
Each artist is allocated half the exhibition space, with Goisum’s photographs displayed on one side and Peng’s films on the other. Goisum’s titles reveal little beyond what can be seen: Move #1 (2025) shows the torsos of two men, one in a grey suit holding the arm of the other, who is wearing a black T-shirt, leaving viewers to guess (or decide for themselves) who they are and what the relationship between them might be. The intrigue of Panel (2025), meanwhile, comes less from the image itself than from how it was made: while this stark monochrome shot of a blank panel on a wall appears, at first glance, rather dull, the original image was, in fact, taken on a mobile phone, from which Goisum produced a film negative that he used to make a silver gelatin print. This process transforms a disposable digital capture into something more permanent, whist the image itself turns the mundanity of a bland empty room into something more haunting and disquieting.
Peng’s films explore urban alienation and confusion, bringing abstract elements into his criticism of censorship and state suppression. He made Déjà vu using Man Ray’s photogram technique, exposing 30 metres of metal wire onto negative 16mm film. The resulting video of a flickering black line is projected onto Emalin’s window, so it can be seen from both inside and outside. As with Goisum’s Panel, the process might have seemed more compelling than the result, were it not for a menacing soundtrack, featuring Peng’s disembodied voice talking about ‘a bodily sensation, not a real memory’ that he experienced in an unspecified waiting room, pointing towards the self-doubt and anxiety that came from witnessing the demonstrations against the government and their swift curtailment and censorship. To whom is the narrator speaking, we wonder, and why doesn’t he feel able to say much of consequence – either about his feelings or with his camera?
The highlight of ‘Evidence’ is Peng’s Autocorrects (2023): a three-screen installation playing a music video drawing on the Japanese ‘city-pop’ genre, popular in China in the 1990s, in which lounge music and spoken lyrics are paired with images of liminal spaces, such as airports and train stations. Peng laser-engraved the 16mm film with lyrics from the song he composed for the work: words such as ‘dignity’ and ‘no lies’, taken partly from diary entries and protest slogans, flash on and off the screens. Integrating Goisum’s images into Peng’s installations, rather than simply presenting the works on opposite sides of the gallery, may have heightened these subjective disorientations even more fruitfully. Nonetheless, the juxtaposition of these artists’ uses of old and new image-making techniques suggests a range of ways to challenge authoritarianism without lapsing into didacticism.
Aslan Goisum and Peng Zuqiang’s ‘Evidence’ is on display at Emalin, London, until 15 February. The exhibition is hosted in collaboration with Antenna Space, Shanghai, as part of CONDO 2025
Main image: Peng Zuqiang, Autocorrects (detail), 2023, three-channel video installation. Courtesy: the artist, Emalin, London and Antenna Space, Shanghai; photograph: Plastiques