INK studio is proud to participate in the fifth edition of West Bund Art & Design from November 8 to 11 in Shanghai, with VIP preview on November 7. Located at booth A203, INK studio presents works by five artists, featuring Bingyi, Li Huasheng, Li Jin, Yang Jiechang, and Zheng Chongbin. During the week of the fair, major museums, galleries, and art spaces around Shanghai will open a multitude of exciting programs, including the 12th Shanghai Biennale. The second week of November in Shanghai has become a major moment in the global art calendar.
Bingyi (b.1975 in Beijing) has developed a multi-faceted practice that encompasses land and environmental art, site-specific architectural installation, musical and literary composition, ink painting, performance art, and filmmaking. In her large-scale ink paintings, Bingyi uses ink as "dark light" —carbon, an absolute absorber of light, in water, nature's universal translucent solvent—to illuminate the usually invisible and transient physical processes that enable ordered patterns and forms to arise from chaos.
Yang Jiechang (b. 1956 in Foshan), 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.
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 West Bund.
Li Jin (b. 1958 in Tianjin), best known for his lush and colorful depictions of sensory pleasures in contemporary China, 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.
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 West Bund
In the fifth edition of West Bund Art & Design, the total exhibition space exceeds 20,000 square meters with more than 110 leading international galleries from 43 cities across Asia, Europe, North America and South America presenting the highest caliber of contemporary art. With a strong selection of returning exhibitors, the 2018 edition welcomes 87 galleries in the Galleries section, among which 39 are participating for the first time. Now in its third edition, the ArtReview Asia Xiàn Chǎng section is comprised of solo presentations by international artists installed inside and outside the West Bund Art Center, spanning the West Bund arts district and existing urban venues. A new section titled DREAM Video 100 will be launched this year, featuring a premier program of over 100 film and video works presented on the outdoor LED projection wall of the Dream Center on the West Bund Plaza and providing a glimpse into the diverse development of Chinese and international video art.
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.
