How is Chinese ink painting explored in contemporary art? RedBox Review in discussion with Liang Quan

CHINESE INK CHINESE ARTISTS ARTIST INTERVIEWS

In a conversation with Chinese-based art blog RedBox Review the artist Liang Quan (b. 1948), living and working in Shenzhen, China, explains how ink painting is used in contemporary art and how this exploration continues to follow the philosophy of traditional Chinese painting.

Liang Quan is considered as one of the pioneers of contemporary ink painting.

“Ink painting”, also known as “wash painting”, was developed in China during the Tang Dynasty. Ink painting or shui-mo hua in Chinese (水墨畫) is composed of water,  shui and Chinese ink, mo. In Western art, using similar techniques, it is known as drawings.

 

Liang Quan, 'Tea Stain No. 3', 2008, ink and paper, 63.8x48 cm.

 

In this conversation Liang Quan highlights to RedBox the difference between ink painting and ink art:

The exploration of using ink and referring to the tradition of Chinese painting is part of a greater narrative to define a cultural identity.

American contemporary artists like Brice Marden and Cy Twombly inspired Liang Quan while he was living and working abroad. On top of using ink painting and water, Liang incorporates paper into his works.

Liang’s ink painting seems abstract but in reality he follows the philosophy of this art. He aims to capture the soul of the subject rather that trying to reproduce the exact appearance of it. As he relates to RedBox,

My use of collage, combining strips of ink and/or tea stained paper, may seem abstract to the unknowing eye, and without direct correlation to a depiction of reality. But my works, collages, are actually diagrams of traditional Chinese landscape paintings and the Chinese still life painting genre of birds and flowers.

 

Interesting difference between ink painting in West and East: perspective

Having explored ink painting in Western art, Liang Quan observed a major difference between it and Chinese landscape painting: multiple points of perspective are used where Western painting uses only one or two.  As he relates to RedBox,

To view a Chinese painting, one’s eye usually follows the flow of water from the bottom of the mountains as it meanders farther into the hills and up the composition of the painting.

Following this philosophy and adding paper strips and color makes Liang’s painting abstract.

After exploring the multiple points of perspective in Chinese landscape painting, Liang Quan combined this concept with the ideals of Nan Pai, also known as Southern School. As said in the RedBox article,

By addressing the theme of Chinese tradition, he is distinguished from his contemporaries choosing to use painting as a depiction of or social response to modern society.

SB/KN/KCE

Related Topics: Chinese artists, definitions, ink

Related Posts:

• Wilson Shieh revitalises ancient Chinese painting techniques – video – September 2010 – an overview of a ChooChoo TV interview with the artist
• Gao Minglu’s maximalist exhibition blurs boundaries between traditional and contemporary Chinese art – June 2005 – an excellent profiling of a little-known movement in Chinese art
• Liu Kuo-sung London retrospective inspires potential British Museum collection – May 2010 – a brief post on the works that inspired this interest
• Chinese ink artist Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian shows 80 works in Spain – Guardian, Int Literary Quarterly – January 2009 – an exhibition alluding to a number of contemporary art world trends
• New York gallery launches series 15 New Chinese Ink artist solo shows – Yishu – October 2008 – outlining a number of solo shows with details on a special show by Wei Ligang

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Wilson Shieh revitalises ancient Chinese painting techniques – video

HONG KONG ARTISTS CHINESE INK PAINTING VIDEO

Art Radar Asia brings you another video (length 5:22 minutes) from Internet channel ChooChooTV’s show [art]attack. This one features Wilson Shieh, one of the few full-time professional artists working in Hong Kong. Specialising in gong-bi, or fine-line, Shieh is admired for creatively merging traditional Chinese painting techniques with modern art elements. In the video on ChooChooTV, Shieh talks about how he develops his unique style of painting and creates intriguing works with it.

“Before I learned the fine-brush technique, I considered this style as just a kind of antique craftsmanship. But after all, as you can see, I have adopted the fine-brush manner in my work. The ancient sense of beauty looks fresh to contemporary eyes.” Wilson Shieh, as quoted on Crown Point Press

Wilson Shieh at work.

While pursuing bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shieh became interested in gong-bi paintings, which inspired him to create an unusual style of work.

Experimenting with the combination of old and new

Since gaining his bachelor’s degree in 1994, Shieh has been working on figure paintings. One of the traditional Chinese painting techniques which Shieh has been using in his works is lin-mo, which involves paper-scanning figures onto traditional gong-bi paintings.

To introduce modern elements in his works, Shieh replaces the ancient costumes of the scanned figures with modern clothing. He also experiments with nude bodies, taking the work “back to basics and nature” and removing the sense of time. An example of this is “Musical Family” (2008), a set of paintings in which nude bodies imitate instruments.

Click here to view more videos from ChooChooTV show [art]attack and read our summaries of them.

CBKM/KN/HH

Related topics: Hong Kong artists, ink painting, videos

Related posts:

• Anti “commercial” art, Luk Tsing Yuen comments on corporate greed: video – August 2010 – also from ChooChoo TV’s [art]attack, watch the Hong Kong artist share his anti-commercial art
• Your interpretation or mine? Hong Kong artist Chow Chun Fai reflects in video interview – July 2010 – also from ChooChoo TV’s [art]attack, watch the Hong Kong artist share the paradox of meaning of art
• Gao Minglu’s maximalist exhibition blurs boundaries between traditional and contemporary Chinese art – June 2010 – discusses maximalist art and artists in the context of an exhibition
• Liu Kuo-sung London retrospective inspires potential British Museum collection – May 2010 – reports British interest in the works of one of the founders of the New Ink Painting Movement
• gallery EXIT a new Hong Kong gallery to watch – May 2010 – introduces a new high quality Hong Kong gallery

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Gao Minglu’s maximalist exhibition blurs boundaries between traditional and contemporary Chinese art

CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ART CHINESE AVANT-GARDE

Contrasts Gallery Shanghai was the host of the recent exhibition “Mind Space: Maximalism in Contrasts” curated by distinguished art scholar and curator Gao Minglu. While visually the works in the exhibition referenced Western modern or conceptual art, the philosophical underpinnings were quite different. Artists Zhu Jinshi, Zhang Yu, Lei Hong and He Xiangyu participated in the show.

All works in the exhibition where chosen because they fall under the term “maximalism”, a term used by Gao Minglu when discussing the philosophical core of Chinese abstract art. Gao characterises the art in “Mind Space: Maximalism in Contrasts” as being “incomplete and fragmented records of daily meditation.” According to the him, they are like a diary or running account showing the daily workings and activities of the artist, be they trivial or not, rather than a complete work of art. In this way, they present some similarities with Western postmodernist deconstruction.

Zhu Jinshi, Hui Neng's Work, 2010, ink on rice paper, 2000 x 72 x 130 cm.

Generally, the work of artists in the maximalism tradition is less popular or has largely been ignored. According to Gao, this is partly because of its lack of political subject matter and partly because of its literati aesthetics. Literati painters were Chinese scholar-officials who were not concerned with technical skill and commonly created black ink paintings. The style of the brushstroke was said to reveal something about the inner life of the artist.

“Although it [Maximalism] has never achieved mainstream popularity (in comparison with Political Pop and Cynical Realism), for decades some Chinese artists have devoted themselves to this low-key avant-garde practice.” Gao Minglu, taken from his essay ‘Mind Space: Maximalism in Contrasts’

How can we come to understand works created in the maximalist tradition? The curator states in his essay, Does Abstract Art Exist in China?, “to decode these works, the audience must do more than read the physical form of a work (that is, it’s surface, or text). It must understand the entire process of making the art, the context underlying the work.”

The four artists: Zhu Jinshi, Zhang Yu, Lei Hong and He Xiangyu

Zhu Jinshi (b. Beijing, 1954) is one of China’s leading avant-garde artists and was a member of the now legendary Stars Group, an artist collective active between 1979 and 1983. Zhu has dedicated the bulk of his career both in China and Germany to the exploration of abstract art and installation work. His medium of choice is Chinese rice paper and ink which he also uses in the exhibited installation, Soaking. Here he fills a metal container with ink and places a pile of rice paper partly immersed in this ink. The half of the paper that is outside the ink gradually changes colour without intervention from human hands. It is a work in progress and uses rice paper and ink; these literati characteristics put the work squarely within the maximalist tradition.

Zhu Jinshi, Soaking, 2008, 170 x 100 x 50 cm.

Like Zhu Jinshi, Zhang Yu (b. Tianjin, 1959) has also chosen rice paper and ink for his installation. For the past twenty years he has been using his finger prints; he dips his fingers into paint or water and randomly places them onto ink painting scrolls. He uses this “language” to express the relationship between our bodies and life. According to curator Gao,”[b]y being transformed from individual identification into repetitious ‘abstract’ marks, the fingerprints lose any expressional and symbolic meaning but regain a universal beauty and infinity through the process.”

Zhang Yu, Fingerprint 2004.10-1, ink on rice paper, 200 × 260 cm.

For The Coca-Cola Project, young artist He Xiangyu (b. Dan Dong, 1986) cooked tens of thousands of litres of Coke which crystalized the dark liquid. He then made ink out of the created substance and used this “ink” to create his paintings and for writing calligraphy.

He Xiangyu, Skeleton no. 1, 2009 125 x 80 cm

Lei Hong’s (b. Sichuan Province, 1972) work has the characteristic marks of Western abstract art – with its myriads of dots, lines and squares – but conceptually his motives are quite different. According to the artist, these marks are not born out of artistic concepts but rather out of imagery, akin to traditional Chinese ink painting.

The curator of the exhibition, Gao Minglu.

Gao Minglu and Contrasts Gallery

Gao Minglu, is an author, critic, curator, and scholar of contemporary Chinese art. He currently serves as Head of the Fine Arts Department at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts and is a Research Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. He has curated many exhibitions in the U.S. and China including the “China/Avant-Garde” exhibition (1989), “Inside Out: New Chinese Art”(1998), “The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art” (2005), “Apartment Art in China, 1970s-1990s” and “Yi School: Thirty Years of Chinese Abstraction” (2008). An art research center in Beijing is named after him, the mandate of which is to work as an alternative research space into contemporary art in China that is neither involved with the government nor with commercial art galleries.

Contrasts Gallery is a Shanghai based gallery which was founded by Pearl Lam in Hong Kong in 1992. The focus of the gallery is to promote cultural dialogue and exchange between the East and West, not only in art but also in design and architecture.

NA/KN

Related Topics: Chinese artists, curators, gallery shows

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• Questioning “Made in China” – Interview Avant-Garde Beijing Artist: Huang Rui – October 2009
• Sneak a peak at the Chinese art collection and private residence of dealer diva Pearl Lam – March 2009
• Top 5 books on Chinese art by Chinese art specialist, Pippa Dennis – October 2008

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Liu Kuo-sung London retrospective inspires potential British Museum collection

As reported by various Taiwanese media outlets, the British Museum has recently expressed interest in collecting works by Chinese/Taiwanese modernist Liu Kuo-sung.

This interest follows a well-received mini-retrospective of 25 of the artist’s paintings at London’s Goedhuis Contemporary. The museum is reported to be interested in acquiring two paintings: Rising Sun, a colour painting from 2008, and Sun and Moon: Floating? Sinking? from 1970.

Liu Kuo-sung, Midnight Sun, 2005, ink and colour on paper, on five panels

Liu Kuo-sung is known as one of the founders of the New Ink Painting movement. Curator Michael Goedhuis explained that “Liu was the first ethnic Chinese artist in the late fifties to study Western art diligently. He spent forty years to create a new artistic language by importing Western artistic concepts into classical Chinese culture.”

Liu Kuo-sung, Heaven Lake, 1982, ink on paper

The artist was born in China but moved to Taiwan in 1949, where he studied fine art at the National Taiwan Normal University. Early on, Liu experimented with abstract oil paintings before developing a unique work practice in the mid-1960s in which he applies ink and colour on special paper. His work is represented in 52 museums and art collections around the world.

KN

Related Topics: Taiwanese artists, Chinese artists, museum collectors, ink painting

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• Taiwan’s “father of printmaking” Liao Shiou-ping wins national award – profile – March 2010
• Which museums are collecting Chinese contemporary art? New database just released – November 2009
• Wu Guanzhong retrospective Singapore Art Museum – New York Times review – May 2009
• Chinese ink artist Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian shows 80 works in Spain – Guardian, Int Literary Quarterly – January 2009
• New York gallery launches series 15 New Chinese Ink artist solo shows – Yishu – October 2008

Subscribe to Art Radar Asia for more on museum collection news

gallery EXIT a new Hong Kong gallery to watch

ART GALLERIES HONG KONG

gallery EXIT is only a bit over a year old and has proven its place in the Hong Kong art landscape by consistently exhibiting high quality art.

It was founded with the “purpose of exhibiting progressive and ambitious works in all media that seek to go beyond the boundaries of nationality and discipline.”

KONG Chun Hei, Record (side A), 2009, ink on paper, 49.2 x 49.2 cm

As an example, the gallery is showing works by Kong Chun Hei in his first solo exhibition, Gleaning.

The artist, born in 1987, graduated at the top of his class from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2009, leaving with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. He demonstrates a disciplined concentration through his work. He lives and works in Hong Kong.

KONG Chun Hei, Snow, 2010, ink on paper, 41.6 x 30.6 cm

The show, consisting of ink on paper drawings of everyday objects, aims to portray the significance of the moment when we accept these objects for what they are. His works focus on the act of drawing itself and its relationship to observation and seeing.

KONG Chun Hei, Book II, 2009, ink on paper, 47.5 x 34.5 cm, framed

gallery EXIT represents a number of internationally recognised artists such as Makoto Fujimura, Huang Zheng and Kwan Sheung Chi, as well as local emerging artists.

KN/KCE

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• Hong Kong’s new museum district appoints ex-Barbican CEO, Graham Sheffield – media round-up – April 2010
• Hong Kong’s Adapta Gallery highlights street art in Asia – profile – April 2010
• Fotan 2010 – a growing cluster of art studios in Hong Kong – February 2010
• Sound art, trickery and time – interview Hong Kong new media artist Chilai Howard Cheng – November 2009
• Shazia Sikander questions authority with new video art medium at Para/Site in Hong Kong – September 2009

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Wu Guanzhong retrospective Singapore Art Museum – New York Times review

CHINESE ART SINGAPORE

Some of the best arts writing on the web is produced by the New York Times. Coverage of art in Asia is rare unfortunately which makes this review of the celebrated and influential 90 year-old Wu Guanzhong’s retrospective at Singapore Art Museum a must-read piece.

In this article Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop deftly explains how his oeuvre evolved in response to his experiences as a student in Paris and his later travails on his return to China where Communist authorities who exalted the Soviet Socialist Realist Style, branded him a ‘bourgeois formalist’ and ultimately destroyed much of his earlier work at the start of the Cultural Revolution.

 

Wu Guanzhong, Pandas

“My father believes that this series of exhibitions are indeed the most important exhibitions of his entire life because they show the full spectrum of his artistic career, from the 1950s to last year. These are also what he considers his absolute best works, which he had kept because he had always planned to give them to museums, for all to see,” said his son, Wu Keyu, 62, who represented his father at the opening of the Singapore exhibition because, he said, the elder Mr. Wu was too frail to travel from Beijing, where he lives.

As a teacher and essayist as well as artist, Wu Guanzhong’s influence has been pivotal on the development of art in China and he  is particularly renowned for

 ”bridging together the Chinese art emphasis placed on the quality of lines and the Western art emphasis on color and the representation of the visual field,” said Kwok Kian Chow, the director of the Singapore Art Museum and the show’s co-curator.

 Related links:

• A Chinese Artist’s merging of East and West – New York Times – May 12 2009
• Images and review Beyond Sg – a handful of images from the show
• Wu Guanzhong – China Culture via China.org.cn 2006 – more details of his life and works
• Baiyaxuan Wu Guangzhong – 2008 – discusses his controversial remarks about China art circles and the influence of Van Gogh on his life
• Eastern Art Report interview with Wu Guanzhong – Wu in his own words

Subscribe to Art Radar Asia for Chinese art news

Chinese ink artist Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian shows 80 works in Spain – Guardian, Int Literary Quarterly

CHINESE INK PAINTING

This exhibition references three trends we are noticing in the art world now: a new interest in ink as a medium, a turning towards the traditional arts as a counterpoint to the recent interest in political art then new media and finally, as Melissa Chiu of the Asia Society has pointed out in the video Inside Chinese Contemporary Art, the growing influence of cultural and political refugee artists on the art practices in their birth countries.

The Deluge to March 2009

Museo Wurth La Rioja presents the exhibition ‘After the Deluge’ which brings together 80 Chinese ink works on canvas and paper by the prestigious Chinese artist Gao Xingjian (China, 1940), 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature. Regarded as one of the most important Chinese writers at present, Gao Xingjian still is not well known as a painter in Spain, although he is recognized by the international art scene and his oeuvre was previously exhibited at the Reina Sofia Museum (Madrid, 2002) says Art Knowledge News.

His work has been presented in several solo and group exhibitions in Europe, Asia and the United States, and is included in several important art collections including the Singapore Art Museum, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Museum of Modern Art Sweden.

Although Gao Xingjian is well-known for having received the Nobel Prize for Literature in the year 2000, his long, versatile professional career reveals him to be a novelist, playwright and essayist, a film and stage director as well as an artist of great international renown according to the Museum. 

Literature and painting encounter serene complicity in the figure of the artist, in which the one is the inseparable complement to the other, one is an extension of the other: “I paint when I am tired of writing. I write when I am tired of painting”.

Gao’s paintings are in Chinese ink, sometimes on small sheets of rice paper, sometimes on large format canvases. The gouache technique, which comes from the traditional Chinese technique of xieyi (literally “painting of the feelings” or “writing of the spirit”), allows him to create subtle, intuitive settings and characters who move in the limits between  figurative and abstract art.

Gao uses Chinese ink with light, fluent strokes, full of contrasts which explore the expressive possibilities of black, creating nuances, light, chiaroscuros, textures and volumes which spring from the artist’s own introspection. Gao paints from the emotions and his forms suggest sensations (Search, Nostalgia, Illusion) subtle natural phenomena (Momentary Rain, The Mist) or the artist’s vision of the presence (Alienation, The End of the World, The Flight).

 

As a refugee of the Cultural Revolution now settled in France, Gao Xinjiang’s art practice is irrevocably marked by his experiences. The Guardian says

Though he enjoys dancing, swimming in the sea and cooking seafood, Gao says he works “non-stop, 12 hours a day”, and never takes summer holidays “or even weekends, because freedom of expression is so precious to me”.

 

Though the Open Door policy operating since the eighties which allows new freedoms to Chinese people, has also brought with it difficulties

The market pressures China now shares with the west are, (Gao) believes, “harder to resist than political and social customs”. He feels lucky that his ink paintings were selling in Europe before he fled, and have been widely exhibited. “I could make a living, so I could write books that didn’t sell much. I always understood that literature can’t be a trade; it’s a choice.” Painting, he says, “begins where language fails”, and he works listening to music – often Bach.

Gao describes his experience of political control being all the harder to bear after his idyllic upbringing in the  intellectually-stimulating open-minded environment created by his parents.

Many people would remember their childhood as a painful, suffering memory. I am extremely lucky in comparison. My mother was educated in an American missionary school so she was very open-minded, and my father had been very much influenced by Western thoughts and ideals. At the same time he was learned in classical Chinese culture. In my family there was no sense of hierarchy, there was no patriarchal control of any kind. I was totally free, I could do whatever I liked, and I was also good at my studies so my parents did not try to influence me whatsoever, in any way. I was completely myself. The first ever sense of control or manipulation or power put upon me was when I first went to University; it was 1957. We had the anti-writers movements, a political campaign against writers and artists. That was the very first time I experienced opposition or some form of control over me.

Since my university years, I have been subject to all kind of politics, all kinds of political control and manipulation, and I very much want to separate myself from that, and I am now advocating or promoting art and literature which is apolitical, which is not used as a tool in politics, it actually transcends and goes beyond and is above politics, it has nothing to do with politics. That is the kind of art and literature I want to promote. So all those political discourses and political language, they are public, they are there to command. Political discourse is the discourse of power, and it is also a public discourse, it doesn’t represent an individual.

His paintings have been described as “infused with the still, reflective quality of Zen Buddhism” and it is in the spirit of xeiyi and the expression of universal feelings that we are to understand the works in this show.

See sources

• Art Knowledge News,
• a full and fasinating interview about Gao Xinjiang’s views of his multiple art practices in the International Literary Quarterly issue 4 May 2008 – highly recommended
•  the Guardian  article about his life and work September 2008 – highly recommended
• more images and accompanying text  Museo Wurth la Rioja Gao Xingjian pdf

Gao Xingjiang’s book Return to Painting presents a collection of more than one hundred of the author’s paintings, created from India ink on rice paper, that span his artistic career from the 1960s to the present day.

More stories on ink, Chinese artists, museum shows, events on now, art as meditation, political art, cultural revolution

Related posts

• Wang Keping another cultural refugee who settled in Paris on show in China November 2008
• New York gallery launches series of 15 Chinese ink artists October 2008
• New ink art at the Hong Kong Museum of Art September 2008

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New York gallery launches series 15 New Chinese Ink artist solo shows – Yishu

Wei Ligang

CHINESE NEW INK

Goedhuis Contemporary will launch a series of 15 solo artist shows devoted solely to the modernist and avant-garde practitioners of the New Chinese Ink Painting with a special show of works by Wei Ligang (b. 1964 Datong City, Shanxi) at its New York gallery from September 25 – October 18.

A selection of Wei Ligang’s works will also be featured at Goedhuis Contemporary exhibitions in October at the Hong Kong International Arts & Antiques Fair, the International Art + Design Fair, and International Fine Art & Antique Dealers Show in New York, and at two Miami shows in December, Art Miami and artAsia.

It is difficult for the West to realize how much courage is required for a Chinese artist to in any way tamper with the hallowed calligraphic formulae evolved by past masters over the last 2000 years. Wei Ligang’s paintings constitute no less than a new pictorial language in which his abstract characters allude to, but also have broken away from, the logic of tradition and emerge in beautiful, relaxed new structures of line and form.

While calligraphy has been the defining feature of Chinese culture, linked to music and dance and ranked alongside poetry as one of the highest forms of Chinese art, it is also a tremendously powerful vehicle for expression in these revolutionary times in China’s political and social history. Wei Ligang goes so far to claim that the only completely Chinese art form today is abstract calligraphy, written on Chinese paper in Chinese ink. Wei Ligang is among the leading artists engaged in a great aesthetic challenge to ensure that this most revered art form can develop so as to be relevant and meaningful not just to China, but throughout the world.

The emphatic Chinese-ness of Wei’s work, which springs in part from his desire to resist the overwhelming influence of Western art, derives from his concern to evoke echoes of the past by de-constructing and re-configuring ancient scripts while still alluding to them through his brush-work and fluctuating densities of ink. Wei Ligang’s objective is not to provide textural gratification but to stimulate the viewer to enjoy the magical transformation of a historical tradition with a continuous intellectual life of more than 3,500 years.

See

• original Yishu story
• Hong Kong Musuem of Art and Manchester Triennial have recently featured New Chinese Ink see more posts on ink
• more about calligraphy inspired contemporary art

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Manga, ink and new generation Chinese – Top ten shows in Hong Kong September 2008 part 1 – Saatchi Online

EXHIBITIONS HONG KONG

Yoshitaka Amano

Yoshitaka Amano – New Works

Art Statements Gallery
30 August to 10 October 2008

Fans of Japanese cartoons and animations are in for a treat this September at Art Statements Gallery where legendary Japanese manga artist Yoshitaka Amano is presenting a solo exhibition of new works. No longer a subculture with a limited following, manga has grown into one of the most significant creative forces exported from Japan in recent history and its influence on mainstream popular culture in film, advertising, industrial design, fashion and graphic design is now regarded as nothing short of a phenomenon. Born in 1952 Amano shot to fame in the 1970s with his cartoon series ‘Gatchaman’ (G-Force) and since then has created many popular epics including the hugely successful video game series ‘Final Fantasy’. Featuring several 2 metre long aluminium panels depicting fantastical creatures, warriors, heroines and superheroes, this is a must-see show for manga buffs and manga neophytes alike.

Chan Yu

Showcase 82 Republic!

Mixed media group show: Chan Yu, Liu Ja, Guo Hongwei, Wan Yang, Zhou Siwei
Connoisseur Gallery
1 September to 30 September 2008

September is going to be an exciting month for Connoisseur’s stable of young artists who will be exhibited in four locations across Asia. Known as the 82 Republic artists, this generation Y group of four painters and one sculptor was born in the eighties and incubated in their own dedicated gallery of the same name. Now ready for the world, their work will be shown in two of Connoisseur’s gallery spaces in Hong Kong – Connoisseur Art Gallery and Connoisseur Contemporary – as well as at the international art fairs at ShContemporary in Shanghai and KIAF in Seoul, Korea and in Connoisseur’s Singapore gallery as a parallel event of the Singapore Biennale 2008. Zhou Siwei’s cartoon-like character in ‘Infection – Astroboy no 7’ and the flat translucent shapes of Chan Yu’s ‘Where is My Childhood? No 9’ exemplify the new ‘spirit’ of this era which has been powerfully influenced by animation, toys and digital culture.

Xue Song: A Tale of Our Modern Time
Kwai Fung Hin Art Gallery
4 September to 27 September

An alarming accident was responsible for a crucial turning point in Xue Song’s art practice: “In 1990, a big fire broke out in my dormitory”. His books, magazines, newspapers, pictures and prints, damaged and burnt, were “released from their frames” leaving Xue Song with a new deeper understanding of the fragmentary, mutable nature of life. From these ashes emerged the embryo of his own significant unique visual language quite distinct from his contemporaries: a language of burning, restructuring, collage and drawing. The retrospective show exhibits Xue Song’s range of interests since the fire from his pop art-coloured Mao series made in the 1990s inspired by leader portraits, model operas, big-character posters (Dazibao) and Red Guards to his more recent preoccupation with modern Shanghai and the intriguing relationship between people and cities.

New Ink Art: Innovation and Beyond
Group exhibition
Hong Kong Museum of Art
22 August to 26 October 2008

“Ink has been part of our history for over 3,000 years,” says guest curator Alice King. “I want to show people how Chinese ink painting has evolved through the ages. It is no longer painted the way it was even twenty years ago”. Comprising 64 works by nearly 30 artists from Hong Kong and the mainland, this thorough survey places the increasingly popular Chinese contemporary ink genre in its historical context with a particular emphasis on the part played by Hong Kong master Lui Shou-kwan who, with his New Ink Movement, has inspired ink artists since the 1960s, amongst them Wucius Wong, Leung Kui-ting, Irene Chou and Kan Tai-keung. The exhibition looks to the future too with some controversial exhibits in the boundary-pushing section called “Is it Ink Art?” Some would say that works such as Cai Guoqiang’s gunpowder images, organic installations and digital works are not ink art at all. This show asks us to question our view of ink as a medium and to appreciate it as an essence, an aesthetic which can find expression in a variety of forms.

See (in new window)

• story on Saatchi Online
• recent posts on Chinese contemporary art
• events on now or upcoming
• more news on ink art
• manga, anime and cartoon art stories
• more about contemporary Japanese art

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New Singapore museum officially opens with contemporary Chinese ink exhibition

Nan Qi Riding Series 23

 

 

 

NEW MUSEUM CONTEMPORARY INK EXHIBITION to 7 September 2008

Just behind the busy streets of Orchard road in Singapore, The Luxe Art Museum occupies two floors of the newly-built Luxe building, with a total of seven hundred square meters of exhibition space and state-of-the-art lighting and display facilities. It officially opened on 6 August.

In affiliation with Yisulang Art Gallery, the Luxe Art Museum aims to propel contemporary Chinese fine arts to the forefront of the art world across Southeast Asia and beyond; by building a representative permanent collection and exhibiting renowned art thus providing a platform for critical fine art research and debate.

Its inaugural exhibition “Chinese Desires” shows contemporary Chinese ink painting by Li Jin, Associate Professor Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, Wu Yi lecturer at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and Nan Qi a professional artist from Beijing.