INK studio is proud to participate in Beijing Contemporary EXPO from August 29 to 31. Located at booth V13, INK studio will present works by five renowned contemporary artists, who express their dynamic artistic concepts through the exploration of ink in different medium and format. Highlights include the Same Line Twice collaborative series by two young artists Hung Fai and Wai Pongyu, works from the pollution sign series by Jiao Yingqi, new calligraphic work by Tao Aimin using the nüshu characters,as well as single-page works from Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky series.
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 and the 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.
Wai Pongyu (b. 1982, Hainan) moved to Hong Kong at the age of two. He graduated from the Fine Arts Department of The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2006. Wai has developed his own oeuvre with ink from ballpoint pen on paper, spinning the thread of his emotion and mind continuously as one line as it multiplies in rhizomatic manner. Wai’s work has been collected internationally by public museums and institutions including the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford. Important exhibitions include: Same Line Twice, collaborative project with Hung Fai, Grotto Fine Art, Hong Kong (2017),The Spirit of Ink: Twelve Hong Kong Artists, Sotheby’s Gallery, Hong Kong (2013), Moment of Truth - The Synergy of Ink (2013) and Ceaseless Lines (2009) both at Grotto Fine Art, Hong Kong.
Jiao Yingqi (b. 1958, Shandong) graduated from the Department of Painting of Shandong Normal University in 1983 and received his master’s degree from the Central Academy of Arts in 1989 and taught there after graduation. He is a conceptual artist based in Beijing, whose artistic practice touches upon various areas including traditional painting, multimedia art, computer coding and researches on Chinese characters. Jiao has exhibited internationally in museums and galleries, including THEROOM, Beijing (2016), The Central Academy of Arts Museum, Beijing (2016), Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai (2016), Arrow Factory Art Space, Beijing (2013), the São Paulo Biennial (1996), Museum of Contemporary Art, Madeira, Portugal (1995), and Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Madrid (1994). The pollution series shown during Beijing Contemporary reflect Jiao’s concern for the current environmental situation in China and his conceptual understanding of the structure of Chinese characters.
A Hunan native who maintains an emotional distance towards her adopted home of Beijing, Tao Aimin (b. 1974) approaches the lives of rural Chinese women with a combination of empathy and anthropological curiosity. With eloquent inarticulacy, she gives voice to their unexpressed and undocumented experiences, which are increasingly at risk of being forgotten. Incorporating found objects, painting, calligraphy, printmaking, video, and installation, her works move fluently between elite and popular culture and between the languages of traditional and contemporary art. They are bold and sensitive meditations on the issues of artistic authorship and self-representation, labor, embodied knowledge, and collective memory. During Beijing Contemporary, INK studio will present Tao’s new series of nüshucalligraphy, illustrating contemporary women’s stories through the dying language of women - nüshu, in memory of their quotidian lives.
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, Xu grew up in Beijing where he studied printmaking at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Trained as a printmaker, Xu 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. Xu Bing has held solo exhibitions 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. Xu’s works have also shown at the 45th and 51st Venice Biennales; the Biennale of Sydney and the Johannesburg Biennale amongst other international exhibitions. Highlights for Beijing Contemporary 2019 include works from his widely celebrated Book from the Skyseries.
About Beijing Contemporary
With a focus on integrating the internal chronicles and the external communications concerning the values in contemporary Chinese art, the Beijing Contemporary EXPO, in collaboration with various art galleries, institutions, collectors, media and brands, aims to build an integrated platform that promotes the development of contemporary Chinese art. We are hoping to discover an organizational approach that connects local experiences in the current globalized context and stimulates the vital energy embedded in the industry in order to consolidate a broader social dimension.
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.
