INK studio is proud to participate in Art Shenzhen from September 14th through September 17th. Located at booth B07, the presentation features works by seven prominent artists, including Hung Fai, Li Huasheng, Li Jin, Cindy Ng, Xu Bing, Yang Jiechang, and Zheng Chongbin.
Hung Fai (b. 1988, Hong Kong) has had a fraught relationship with the ink tradition as the son of landscape painter Hung Hoi, with whom he never studied. One of Hung Fai’s formative childhood memories is surreptitiously adding a disruptive rock to his father’s composition. After pursuing other media for years, he found his “voice” in ink in 2012 by adopting a deconstructive approach of radical deskilling and creative antagonism. He finds expressive freedom within power relations, whether between a creator andthe medium, between two creators, or between himself and the patriarchal tradition as personified by his father. Hung Fai’s work is in the collections of M+ and the Hong Kong Museum of Art.
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 Art Shenzhen.
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.
Cindy Ng (b. 1966, Macau) stages live performances of light and liquids, drawing from her rich experience in capturing fluid ink directly on paper or canvas. For over a decade, she participated in a form of improvisational, non-narrative, gesture-based theater, initially creating the video backdrop and ultimately becoming a performer herself. The issues of narrative, interactivity, performance, and self-expression remain central to her work, and she embraces the cathartic potential of theater. Her work is in the collections of the Taiwan Museum of Art; Macau Art Museum; Today Art Museum, Beijing; among others.
Xu Bing (b. 1955) is widely recognized as one of the leading conceptual artists of language and semiotics working today. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, he is celebrated for his “capacity to contribute importantly to society, particularly in printmaking and calligraphy.” Born in Chongqing, China in 1955, Xu grew up in Beijing where he studied printmaking at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Trained as a printmaker, Xu’s work is informed by the Cultural Revolution, Chan Buddhism,and his keen interest in the relationship between meaning and words, writing,and reading. He has famously re-invented Chinese characters and the English alphabet, rendering Chinese nonsensical and English into legible Chinese characters, effectively challenging comprehension of both. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the British Museum in London,among other major institutions. In addition, Xu Bing has shown at the 45th and 51st Venice Biennales; the Biennale of Sydney and the Johannesburg Biennale among other international exhibitions.
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 Art Shenzhen
Art Shenzhen is the key project of China (Shenzhen) International Cultural Industry Fair (ICIF) 1+N. After sustainable development and perfection throughout 2016 and 2017, Art Shenzhen has entered into the forefront of the domestic brand contemporary art fairs. After years of accumulation and management, Art Shenzhen has been widely recognized by institutions and markets. It is highly valued by both exhibiting institutes and the media. Collectors also speak highly of the fair with powerful purchases. Art Shenzhen has become a new star in the art fair market. Shenzhen has accordingly been famed by the professional media as the most potential art market and the most ecological art city after Beijing and Shanghai.
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.
