The Brooklyn Rail

The warmth a dog emits imbues Essex Flowers with celestial power. Chen Peng and Fan Wu have made an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and sculptures (all 2026) of their dogs Kara and Oke. In the collaborative show Dog Nights, Peng’s dreamy oil paintings pair with Wu’s ink drawings to create a portrait of magic and vulnerability. In sharing the close attention they give their dogs, Peng and Wu reveal their care for one another.

Wu’s 60 Nights with Kara and Oke covers one wall with a grid of small, pinned sketches. Delicate black ink outlines the figures of Oke and Kara at rest, rarely taking up the whole page. Time accumulates through the dated images, hung out of order. Sparse words—as if snippets from diary entries—accompany the sketches in English, Chinese, and Japanese. Perforated squares line the top of each page, suggesting that the paper was torn from a notebook. Trials and errors remain: small noses meet rounded jaws, collapsing into triangles rather than faces. In a drawing dated February 8, 2026, a sleeping dog is accompanied by the quip, “Waiting for the barbarian,” referring to Peng. The role reversal imbues the dog with human emotion, while Peng is present even when unseen. Wu’s vignettes of the dogs’ space—a bed covered in clouds, picture frames with their drawings, and blankets filled with textured lines—place them within the couple’s home. On the ground, below these sketches, is the wonderful life-size sculpture, Sleeping Oke. Wu constructed the cardboard bases, and Peng added texture, coating them in white clay. Brown lines mark her closed eyes, but the rest of the work remains white. Wu’s honest depictions set the stage for Peng’s imagination.

On another wall, reality slips into the ethereal. Peng’s three paintings, titled In a Land Far, Far Away I-III, depict an emotional atmosphere that reflects how she sees Kara. In each, Kara lies in the center of his bed. In two of the works, he is sleeping, in the other, he is awake. In all, he is surrounded by grass. As Peng describes, these are her imagined dreamworlds for Kara. “In a Land Far, Far Away” evokes classical fairytale language, framing Kara as mythic, a figment of the artist’s imagination. In In a Land Far, Far Away I, Kara’s nose is tucked behind his paw as he sleeps curled in the center of the bed. The bed’s smooth brushstrokes create a hazy atmosphere, washing the bed in sunset colors. The top of the bed’s violet fades into a light yellow, mimicking the sky’s pattern as the sun sets. Kara’s brown wisps of fur are painted with hints of gold. Her brightness blends into the sky’s yellow. Kara becomes the source of light in Peng’s imagined world. Even the grass is tinted with Kara’s golden luminosity. The grass’ blades protrude from the surface in short, thick strokes. They carry a physical weight, as if keeping the bed in place, grounding us in this fantasy. In the second work, Kara, awake, gazes outward into the grassy world. A pale blue overcast has replaced the yellow, giving his beige coat a calmer tint. The bed’s uniform brushstrokes place him in a cloudlike form. Peng layers navy shadows on the misty sky to give greater definition—awake, he feels closer to the human world. For Peng, even as light shifts, Kara remains the center of the sky.

In a second room, the large rectangular canvas, Antares, presents an even bolder depiction of the sky. Here, Oke sleeps in teal grass with no bed. Her body is rendered in a deep blue that resembles a vibrant night sky. The curve of her spine is rich with darkness, which lightens to turquoise towards her paws. Her tail and nose glow green, lit by the night sky. Unlike Kara, Oke is not a part of the sun’s setting; she is the sky. Within Oke’s body, small white dots form stars that compose the Scorpius constellation. Looking carefully, you can make out a small planet and Antares itself, a burning red star at the heart of Scorpio, Peng’s sign. Like other works, Antares does not have a wall label beside it, and the tiny red star must be found—intimacy and understanding have to be earned.

Yet again, Wu’s work disrupts Peng’s fairytale and returns the dogs to time. A large ink mural, dated January 12, 2022, depicts a shrine for their beloved dog Sasa. After Sasa passed away, Peng and Wu adopted Kara and Oke, older dogs who needed a home. To honor Sasa, they built a shrine for her, which Wu originally sketched when they built it; here, Wu recreated it on the wall, another act of care for Sasa. In this drawing, Sasa’s face repeats in and out of picture frames, which arch around her favorite blankets and toys. A large sheet of notebook paper, the kind used in 60 Nights with Kara and Oke, holds another image of Sasa. A water and food bowl are present but empty. Below, the phrase “I will wait for you” is written too large to miss. Nearing the end of Sasa’s life, Wu began drawing her every day. This is how the ritual of the daily dog drawings began. Wu’s 60 Nights with Kara and Oke is reframed as future memories. Just as in 60 Nights with Kara and Oke, Wu, Oke, and Kara wait for Peng, “the barbarian,” to come home, they continue to wait for Sasa.

Wu refuses to ignore the passage of time, but Peng freezes moments. Peng holds the dogs outside time, enlarging their life. Wu orients the viewer in reality, freeing Peng to paint their dogs as stars of her fables. Peng and Wu’s harmony fills the air with tenderness. Care seeps into every part of the show, making it impossible not to feel.