INK studio is proud to participate in the inaugural Beijing Contemporary EXPO from August 30th through September 2nd. Located at booth V03, the presentation features major works by four prominent artists, including Li Huasheng, Li Jin, Yang Jiechang, and Zheng Chongbin. It is also complemented by a major work by Li Huasheng in the curated section of the fair.
Li Huasheng (b. 1944 in Yibin, d. 2018 in Chengdu) was a classically-trained ink painter who explored the shared phenomenology between mind-hand embodiment in classical brush and ink practice in calligraphy and landscape painting and time- and process-based practices employed in contemporary art. Li's practice included processual grid paintings, abstract ink landscapes, photography and ink-and-paper-based installations. In commemoration of the artist’s recent passing, INK studio will showcase Li Huasheng's iconic grid paintings and one of his rarely-exhibited and highly-abstract ink landscapes drawn from his deep connection with the mountains of the Himalayan Plateau in the curated section of the fair.
Best known for his lush and colorful depictions of sensory pleasures in contemporary China, Li Jin (b. 1958 in Tianjin) has now turned his focus towards painting in monochrome, translating his well-honed sensitivity towards color washes into a masterful control of tonality. He paints in a looser, more gestural and expressive daxieyi style, exploiting the accidental effects of the medium. Along with the new series, we present Li Jin's rarely-seen paintings from the 1990's, when he was a young wanderer and sojourner in Tibet in search of an authentic and primal connection to nature. Pulsating with the intensity and fragility of life that he experienced there, the Tibet-period works relate strikingly to his new series, which itself represents another return to a state of pure and unencumbered creativity.
The artistic practice of Yang Jiechang (b. 1956 in Foshan) as a calligrapher-painter turned global social actor inverts the contemporary Chinese art world norm of using Western avant-garde forms to critique contemporary Chinese society. He accomplishes this by adopting the performative expressivity of the traditional brush and the paradoxical dialectics of pre-modern Daoist skeptics to expose the underlying social and cultural forces that shape our contemporary global reality. With his purely abstract One Hundred Layers of Ink works, which he inaugurated for the seminal 1989 trans-national show Magiciens de la Terre, Yang deals with the contrasting themes of material and spiritual transcendence, liberation of the individual, universal love and nature.
Throughout his career of three decades, Zheng Chongbin (b. 1961 in Shanghai) has held the classical Chinese ink tradition and Western pictorial abstraction in productive mutual tension. By exploring and exploiting the immanent qualities and behavior of his materials— ink, acrylic, water and paper—Zheng has developed a distinctive language of indexical abstraction—what critic Mark van Proyen calls “pre-constructed” in contrast to “de-constructed” art. Mounted on custom-fabricated, honeycomb-aluminum panels, Zheng’s latest works move into three-dimensional wall sculpture, enabling him to integrate elements of his light-and-space installation practice.
About Beijing Contemporary EXPO
Taking the form of EXPO, as a breakthrough, Beijing Contemporary is committed to promoting the value of Chinese contemporary art. By taking contemporary art galleries as its close partners and members of a community of common destiny, it is aiming to set up a top platform for art trading, display, communication, which is closely linked to the contemporary art eco-system and all social classes, so its cultural subjectivity and value systems could be echoed in the cultural market by the public. Beijing Contemporary has established five Units, namely, "Story", "Value", "Future", "Energy" and "Wonder". The EXPO has invited altogether 32 galleries from Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Europe, the United States, Japan, and South Korea.
About INK studio
INK studio is an art gallery based in Beijing. Its mission is to present Chinese experimental ink as a distinctive contribution to contemporary transnational art-making in a closely-curated exhibition program supported by in-depth critical analysis, scholarly exchange, bilingual publishing, and multimedia production. INK studio curates three to four major solo projects per year with artists such as Bingyi, Dai Guangyu, He Yunchang, Li Jin, Li Huasheng, Wang Dongling, Yang Jiechang, and Zheng Chongbin and exhibits works of diverse media, including painting, calligraphy, sculpture, installation, performance, photography, and video. Since its inception in 2012, INK Studio has regularly appeared at art fairs such as the Armory Show (New York), Art Basel Hong Kong, and West Bund Art & Design (Shanghai) and placed works into major public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, and M+Museum, Hong Kong.
