Kuāfù Chasing the Sun: Kanthy Peng and Genesis Báez in Conversation | September 18, 2025 7PM

Kuāfù Chasing the Sun

Kanthy Peng and Genesis Báez in Conversation

September 18, 2025
Thursday, 7 PM
at Bungee Space

Join us at Bungee Space for an evening of conversation between Kanthy Peng and Genesis Báez, presented by te editions, to mark the New York launch of Ground Sea, Peng’s debut book. Báez, a longtime peer and witness to Peng’s artistic journey, will guide the discussion through themes of movement, intimacy, and rehearsal, tracing how the book negotiates belief, trust, and the possibilities of failure.

This artist talk will be followed by a book signing. Special edition copies will be available, with each copy accompanied by a print.

RSVP Required

Ground Sea / 地浪 weaves a visual narrative exploring depression, memory, and loss through 73 photographs.

The title takes inspiration from an archaic West Indian term, which anthropologist and feminist Emily Martin used to capture her sensations when observing the Affective Disorder Clinical Rounds: “(Ground-sea is the name) for a swell of the ocean, which occurs in calm weather and without obvious cause, breaking on the shore in heavy roaring billows. A distant storm, out of sight, is often the cause of a ground-sea.”

In Ground Sea, Peng re-orchestrates photographs spanning over a decade and multiple projects into a new diptych-structured work. The first part, Sunset Watchers, unfolds through black-and-white portraits of three women reenacting a phantom folktale following the 1896 tsunami in Japan—images that also allude to the anxious premonition of those living with depression. Interspersed color photographs recall Peng’s bodily memory of being bedridden due to illness.

The second part, Kuāfù Chases The Sun, carries stills from two video works about Peng’s father, who retired from the People’s Liberation Army ten years after his daughter left home. In these images, his body is constantly propelled forward by the cogs of a system, breaking the stagnation of the first part, only to fall into nothingness ultimately.

Peng likens the depressed body to a receptor and amplifier of signals from the future, much like the camera she holds in her hands. In the tension between stillness and motion, waiting and chasing, the book poses a question: Are those paralyzed by the impending catastrophe in need of treatment, or is it the society—numbed by its relentless pursuit of progress—that requires awakening?

About the artists
Kanthy Peng is an artist specializing in lens-based mediums. Her current practice focuses on the uneven mobility of people, embodied in colonialism and globalized tourism, and caused by illness and disaster. Peng holds an MFA from the Yale School of Art and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her works have been exhibited and screened internationally, including, most recently, at the European Media Art Festival (Germany), Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival (China), and FotoFocus Biennial (United States). Her debut photobook Ground Sea was published in 2025 by te editions. She has received fellowships and residencies from Spazju Kreattive (Malta), the Jan van Eyck Academie (Netherlands), and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (United States).
Genesis Báez is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Centering photography, her works merge performance, observation, and unfolding histories of modern de/colonization in a conversation about placemaking. Her inquiries center photography’s material qualities—stasis, edges, and light—and what they may reveal about our permeability and interconnectedness. Her monograph Blue Sun (Capricious, 2025) gathers a decade of photographs made in Puerto Rico and its diaspora. Báez’s works have exhibited internationally, most recently at the Whitney Museum, Kilometro in San Juan, and the Princeton University Art Museum. Her works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Báez currently teaches at Princeton University as an Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies.
te editions is a curatorial, editorial, and publishing collective operating in New York and Beijing, dedicated to exploring the intersection of art and the humanities. We examine historical and contemporary social landscapes through a diversified and microscopic lens, focusing on how cultures encounter, collapse, and transform each other within global cultural flows.

All images courtesy of the artist
Poster by Shuyu Peng