Alisan Fine Arts presents “New Ink Art,” an exhibition of works by seven international Chinese artists, consisting of a total of around 30 paintings, installations, and sculptures dating from the 1990s to the present. The exhibition explores the development of “New Ink Art.” These artists seek to reinterpret ink painting in non-conventional ways. The end result is an art form that is contemporary yet strongly rooted in tradition.
As the medium of ink is being internationally recognized, these innovative works of art have been popularized in the 21st century and are fast becoming a contemporary idiom. The seven international Chinese artists featured in this exhibition are: Wei Ligang 魏立剛 (born 1964 Datong City, China, currently living in Beijing),
Yang Jiechang 楊詰蒼 (born 1956 Foshan, China, currently living in Paris),
Wang Tiande 王天德 (born 1960 Shanghai, China, currently living in Shanghai),
Shen Fan 申凡 (born 1952 Jiangyin, China, currently living in Shanghai),
Jiang Dahai 江大海 (born 1949 Nanjing, China, currently living in Paris),
Ming Fay 費明杰 (born 1943 Shanghai, China, currently living in New York),
and Yang Qi 楊起 (born 1952 Wuhu, China, currently living in Düsseldorf, Germany).
What is New Ink Art?
Chinese ink painting has a particularly long history of over 3,000 years. The continuous reinterpretation links ink art to our present-day society and keeps it alive. The modernization of ink painting started in Hong Kong in the 1950s with the ink master Lui Shou Kwan (1919-1975), who reached his peak with the creation of the “Zen painting” series from the late 1960s to the 1970s.
In Mainland China, Wu Guanzhong's (born 1919 Jiangsu, China) controversial essays unleashed much discussion toward the end of the 1970s, leading to the ink movements “New Wave” in the 1980s and “Experimental Art” in the 1990s. These movements pointed to the many new directions in ink aesthetics and continued to inspire artists to engage in the evolution, exploration, and breakthrough of concepts.
For example, selected artists in this exhibition belong to this group: Yang Jiechang’s “100 Layers of Ink” series (1990s) and “Tomorrow Cloudy Sky” (2005), Wei Ligang’s abstract calligraphy with metallic color (1990s-2010), Shen Fan’s minimalist oil paintings (1990s-2005), Wang Tiande’s recent works of landscape in ink and burn marks, and Jiang Dahai’s “Images of Calligraphy” series (2005-6).
Ink art has come full circle as some artists continue to push the boundaries beyond the two-dimensional ink on paper. Ming Fay and Yang Qi transform ink paintings into installations, providing new visual experiences. Their works can be interpreted as three-dimensional Chinese ink paintings. The gestural bravado of the Chinese brush is brought alive in Ming Fay’s bold yet nuanced branches of “Downturn” and “Money Tree” (2010). The recent work “Flying Shoes” by Yang Qi, in which he combines enlarged shoes with small ink paper figures, evokes memories of a Chinese lifestyle of a bygone era.
This exhibition seeks to understand “ink” in its broadest sense. Whether in oil or other media, we see similar brushwork used by artists as having an affinity to ink painting because of its evocative rendering. Their innovative pieces will perhaps draw people’s attention to the New Ink Art.
Exhibiting Artists on “New Ink Art”
Wei Ligang 魏立剛 (born 1964 Datong City, China, currently living in Beijing)
Wei Ligang, one of the most significant artists of the post-modern calligraphy movement in China over the last 20 years, attempts to transform Chinese calligraphy into contemporary abstract ink painting. In 2005, as a fellowship grantee from the Asian Cultural Council Hong Kong, Wei traveled to New York to research recent developments in contemporary art.
As an art form based on Fushan’s cursive calligraphy, Wei Ligang’s ink work has a close relationship with Chinese characters and writing. He adds cursive to the already complex seal script to make his work illegible, resulting in paintings of non-semantic forms. At times borrowing from Japanese modern calligraphy and Western Abstract Expressionism, his strokes intertwine, tangle, penetrate, and overlap, sometimes combined with metallic color, creating a visual complexity of magical power and metamorphic unpredictability.
Since the 1980s, he has exhibited in New York, London, Sydney, Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Xi’an, Chengdu, Hong Kong, Taipei, and other locations. His works are collected by the British Museum (UK), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, USA), Today Art Museum (Beijing), and He Xiang Ning Art Gallery (Shenzhen, China), among others.
Yang Jiechang 楊詰蒼 (born 1955 Foshan, China, currently living in Paris)
Yang Jiechang successfully breaks through the traditional constraints in ink art. He studied traditional Chinese art, such as the “Gongbi” technique, and Taoism in Guangzhou before moving to Paris in 1989. Taoism has deeply influenced his art, particularly the theory of “sublimation in meditation.”
He uses multiple layers of ink on paper to create large textured black spaces that are both shiny and matte, recalling the dualistic Taoist principle in his “100 Layers on Ink.” The effect upon the viewer is a feeling of contemplative tranquility. Stillness and liveliness coexist in his work. “100 Layers of Ink” is collected by the Ullens Foundation.
In recent years, he has returned to his “Gongbi” technique, producing a series on cloudy skies, expressing his passion and creativity in Chinese ink art. In 2005, he was a visiting artist at Stanford University, California, and in 2008, he was again invited as a Sterling visiting professor. Since the 1980s, Yang Jiechang has exhibited his works in numerous countries, including France, Finland, Scotland, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Poland, Italy, Denmark, Belgium, Turkey, Iran, the USA, Canada, Australia, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Macau, China, and Taiwan.
Wang Tiande 王天德 (born 1960 Shanghai, China, currently living in Shanghai)
An innovative Chinese avant-garde ink painter and scholar from Shanghai, Wang is a professor at Fudan University and the Dean of the School of Communication & Design at the Shanghai Institute of Visual Art. His burnt calligraphy series was exhibited at the “Brush and Ink: The Chinese Art of Writing” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Sept 2006 to Jan 2007), and his works are collected by the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Hong Kong Museum of Art, and various museums in China.
Wang’s new landscape paintings combine traditional ink medium with burn marks to create landscape images in a new and exciting way. Consisting of two layers of rice paper, the landscape on top is “painted” with a cigarette instead of ink and brush, revealing glimpses of the real landscape underneath. By carefully burning the contour and shades of mountains, trees, and digital inscriptions, the artist showcases his talent and training in Chinese traditional landscape painting. The unique burnt landscapes stand out with their distinctive quality.
