Founded in 1981 in Hong Kong, 2026 marks the 45th anniversary of Alisan Fine Arts. To commemorate the occasion, we have organized a series of exhibitions across our various gallery locations and at art fairs under the theme of “Then and Now”. Here at Alisan Fine Arts New York, our focus will be on the Chinese Diaspora artists with whom we’ve worked since the gallery’s early years, alongside a new generation of contemporary artists. Organized into three galleries, the exhibition centers on three themes: Reinventing Tradition, featuring the work of Lui Shou-Kwan, Wucius Wong, Yang Jiechang and Yang Yanping; New York, featuring the work of Walasse Ting, Ming Fay, Chinyee; and Home and Abroad, featuring artists Chu Chu, Summer Lee, Justin Lim, Yifan Jiang, Jia Sung, and Kelly Wang.
Reinventing Tradition
In Hong Kong, the New Ink Movement was founded in the 1960s by artists Lui Shou-Kwan and his student Wucius Wong. Lui arrived in Hong Kong from Guangzhou in 1948 and began to incorporate abstract and expressionistic elements within the ink tradition through semi-abstract landscapes and his acclaimed ‘Zen paintings’. Wong, who spent a decade in New York before returning to Hong Kong where he had studied, integrates the design elements of the Bauhaus in his Song dynasty-inspired landscape paintings, using geometric frameworks to further the possibilities of the ink tradition. An artist who has remained in the U.S. is artist Yang Yanping, who had received a fellowship from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1986. Best known for her Lotus paintings, she has also created abstract ink works and calligraphic works, several of which were recently exhibited in Line, Form, Qi (2025) at LACMA. Another artist featured in that exhibition was Yang Jiechang. Originally from Guangzhou, China, Yang moved to Paris after participating in the exhibition Les Magiciens de Terre, held at Centre Pompidou in 1989, where he debuted his landmark series 100 Layers of Ink. Yang’s most recent series Tale of the 11th Day depicts an imagined utopia; a monumental work from this series is currently on view at M+ Museum, Hong Kong.
New York Voices
In the 1980s, two of the earliest artists that the gallery showcased were Walasse Ting and Ming Fay. Active in New York since the late 1950s, Ting is well-known for his celebrated book of lithography and poetry 1-cent Life, a collaboration with leading Pop Art and Expressionist artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Joan Mitchell. In the late 80s, Ting had moved from canvas to paper, using traditional Chinese ink and acrylic paint to create his now signature style of colorful Tang Dynasty-inspired women and landscapes. Ming Fay was a first-generation Chinese-American artist born in China who emigrated to the U.S. as a young adult. Best known for his large fruit sculptures and mixed-media installations, Fay was a prominent figure in New York’s downtown art scene. Fay is currently experiencing a resurgence of attention among art institutions, including a large-scale retrospective held at Boston’s Isabella Gardener Museum in 2025. Also featured in this section is Chinyee, who was based in upstate New York but often exhibited in the city. Like Ting, She was a first-generation Chinese-American artist who arrived in the U.S. in the 1950s. Associated with the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, her gestural and loose brush strokes reflect both Asian brush techniques and years of careful study of modernist abstract art.
Home and Abroad
Today, it is commonplace to find Chinese diaspora artists across the globe, with many now second- and third-generation in their home countries. This prompts a question common across diaspora communities: where do we call home? The artists in this section include Jia Sung, born in Minnesota and raised in Singapore, now based in New York; Kelly Wang, born and raised in New York; Summer Lee, born and raised in San Francisco, and Yifan Jiang, born in Tianjin, China, raised in Vancouver, Canada, and currently based in New York. All four artists’ diverse lived experiences shape their practices, which range across a variety of media including painting, embroidery, video, and installation. Two artists are from Asia - Justin Lim, a painter based in Malaysia, and Chu Chu, a calligrapher and photographer based in China whose international travels parallels that of today’s multi-national artists. Together, these works serve as a vivid portrayal of the diversity and depth within the Chinese Diaspora today.
