INK studio is proud to participate in Art Shenzhen International Contemporary Art Fair from September 12 to 15. Located at booth D07, INK studio will present works by eigh contemporary artists who express their dynamic artistic concepts through the exploration of ink in different medium and formats. Highlights include Bingyi’s Fairies series and new abstract landscape paintings; Korean artist Kim Jongku’s Steel Powder Painting series; Li Huasheng’s early landscape album leaves and his signature grid paintings; Peng Kanglong’s flower paintings and landscape handscrolls; Tao Aimin’s new nüshu calligraphy; Wang Tiande’s new landscape paintings that incorporate his unique burn marks and rubbings of ancient texts; Wang Dongling’s new calligraphic works; and Wei Ligang’s calligraphic works as well as abstract ink painting with vibrant colors.
An artist, architectural designer, curator, cultural critic, and social activist, Bingyi (b. 1975) 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. Adopting a non-anthropocentric perspective and channeling nature’s creative agency, her work is centrally concerned with the themes of ecology, ruins, rebirth, and poetic imagination. During Art Amoy, INK studio will present Bingyi’s abstract ink wash paintings and her exquisite fan leaves, showing her exploration of the ink medium with profound diversity – channeling between macro and micro level of artistic practice.
Encompasses painting, calligraphy and installation, Kim Jongku’s (b. 1963) practice adopts the medium of grated iron powder. To the artist, iron is a symbol of modern civilization and the human desire of everlasting progress. By refining iron into his “ink”, the artist reveals the delicate and impermanent qualities of iron and repurposes it for his landscape compositions.
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. During Art Shenzhen, INK studio will present a set of his early landscape album leaves together with his iconic grid-paintings, which capture and record the moment-by-moment phenomenological state of his body, perceptions, feelings, emotions and thoughts.
Peng Kanglong (b. 1962) graduated from Taipei National University of the Arts, majoring in Chinese ink painting. His ink paintings with spontaneous, wild and yet highly controlled brushworks subvert and transcend traditions in Eastern art, capturing his inner-world and exploring the subject of human desire. The ink-and-color flower paintings presented during Art Shenzhen 2019 display Peng’s rigorous and expressive brushwork full of energy and emotion, without the limitation of a particular artistic tradition or style. The long horizontal landscape scrolls, on the other hand, show a more complex and ambitious composition and overall coherence, allowing the audience to enjoy the landscape of his mind and experience, as a visitor, his imaginary world of brush and ink.
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 Art Shenzhen, INK studio will present Tao’s new series of nüshucalligraphy, illustrating contemporary stories of women through the dying language of nüshu,in memory of women’s quotidian lives.
Wang Dongling (b. 1945) 's artworks ground the modernist engagement with gestural abstraction and the post-modern skepticism of language and power in the pre-modern practice of embodied action and performance originally developed in Chinese calligraphy. Wang Dongling himself is widely recognized as China's greatest living calligrapher and is perhaps the only artist to have been granted three solo exhibitions at the National Art Museum of China. Although he is perhaps best known for public performances of monumental "mad" cursive script calligraphy, his artistic practice can be highly experimental and includes "enormous, swashbuckling abstractions" (Roberta Smith, New York Times, [December 12, 2013]) and calligraphy in new media, such as chemical photography, in which Wang's calligraphic actions are directly captured on silver-gelatin photographic paper.
A prominent figure in the development of modern calligraphy, Wang Tiande (b. 1960) graduated from the Chinese Paintings Department of Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art) in 1988 and later obtained his doctorate degree from its Calligraphy Department. He is now a professor of art at Fudan University in Shanghai. Wang Tiande has been continuously exploring the language of ink and its potential for spiritual expression. He often takes sources in classical landscapes and calligraphy, but he replaces the brushes with sticks of burning incense, executing his imagery in a unique artistic language. Imbuing the landscape with a certain contemporaneity, Wang Tiande creates an expansive virtual space in which contemporary people can engage with both nature and the ancients.
In his career of three decades, Wei Ligang (b. 1964) has sought a universal language of abstraction based on the linear and spatial compositions of Chinese writing, a language capable of embodying the complexity and expansiveness of contemporary human knowledge and existence. His signature “magic squares,” which preserve the structure and strokes of Chinese characters and hark back to the pictographic origins of Chinese writing, are one of the earliest examples of a distinctly personal language in contemporary Chinese art. Wei Ligang generalizes the continuous cursive calligraphy of the 17th-century Shanxi calligrapher Fu Shan, applying it to the seal, clerical, and Oracle Bone scripts of antiquity to create the distinctive script styles of epigraphic mad cursive, “gold-ink cursive,” and “shadow cursive.” Wei Ligang is also the author of a celebrated body of calligraphy-informed abstract paintings. INK studio will showcase representative works of each style during Art Shenzhen.
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.
