Booth 3D18 ｜Galleries, Kabinett
Convention & Exhibition Centre, 1 Harbour Road, Wan Chai, Hong Kong, China
VIP Days (by invitation only):
First Choice | Wednesday, March 26, 12 noon to 8pm
First Choice and Preview | Wednesday, March 26, 3pm to 8pm
First Choice and Preview | Thursday, March 27, 12 noon to 4pm
First Choice and Preview | Friday, March 28, 12 noon to 2pm
First Choice and Preview | Saturday, March 29, 12 noon to 2pm
First Choice and Preview | Sunday, March 30, 11am to 12 noon
Vernissage
Thursday, March 27, 4pm to 8pm
Public Days
Friday, March 28, 2pm to 8pm
Saturday, March 29, 2pm to 8pm
Sunday, March 30, 12 noon to 6pm
For Art Basel Hong Kong 2025, INKstudio showcases a group presentation of twelve artists under two distinct curatorial themes. “China Post-Opening INK”—our Kabinett Sector program—will include early, formative works dating from the 1980´s and 1990´s by pioneering Chinese INK artists including Liu Dan, Li Huasheng, Xu Bing, Yang Jiechang, Li Jin and Zheng Chongbi. “Outsider INK”—our Galleries Sector program—will introduce the INK art practices of women, queer and transgender artists whose perspectives have largely been excluded or ignored in the official art histories in China and East Asia. Artists include Chen Haiyan, Tao Aimin, Bingyi, Kang Chunhui, Tseng Chien-ying and Ren Light Pan.
Galleries | Outsider INK
Despite the socialist revolutionary ideal that “women hold of half the sky,” China today remains an intractable patriarchal society in which the perspectives of female, queer and transgender individuals are frequently marginalized and overtly suppressed. For its proposed Galleries Sector presentation, INKstudio will focus on artists who use the historical medium, language and discourse of INK art to articulate the perspectives of women and LGBTQI+ individuals.
Featured artists will include the printmaker Chen Haiyan (b. 1955), who uses the language of state propaganda— the socialist realist woodcut—to journal and publicly share her personal dreams; the anthropologically-grounded conceptual artist Tao Aimin (b. 1974) whose documentary and material-culture sensitive practice records the often-ignored lives of rural women in China; the land-and-weather artist, painter, writer, filmmaker and trained archaeologist Bingyi (b. 1975) who speculatively reconstructs Chinas patriarchal, Confucian and anthropocentric political philosophy, literature and art history from a feminist, Taoist, post-human perspective; the Urumchi-born visual artist Kang Chunhui (b. 1982) whose material research into the use of mineral, animal and vegetable pigments in early Buddhist mural paintings along the Silk Road (3rd to 8th Centuries) traces pre-colonial, trans- national economic, religious, cultural and artistic exchange between South Asia, the Middle East, Europe and East Asia via Central Asia; the visual artist Tseng Chien-Ying (b. 1987) who uses a personally-inflected “queer” sensibility, religious iconography and religious visual experience to critically interrogate received notions of normal/abnormal, good/bad, beautiful/ugly, desirable/undesirable by inverting the religious iconography of the sacred and sacrilegious; and the Chinese-American transgender multi-media visual artist Ren Light Pan (b. 1990) whose use of INK against modes of contemporary painting—namely readymade and anti-gestures, deconstruction as well as techniques influenced by photographic, filmic and printmaking processes—explores biographical issues dealing with hybridized and transgressive cultural and gender identities.
Kabinett | China Post-Opening INK
New curatorial initiatives at International modern and contemporary institutions such as M+, LACMA, Centre Pompidou and TATE Modern are exploring how contemporary INK art has served a critical yet under-recognized role in the construction of Modernist cultural identities in Post-war Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China. In each respective socio-political context, artists have explored how historical art practices—specifically painting and calligraphy using brush and ink on paper—can change to communicate original meaning in new and rapidly-changing contemporary contexts.
Contemporary INK art in China first emerged during the China Post-Opening period when art academies reopened after the end of the Cultural Revolution and graduated a generation of talented young artists eager to engage with the rest of the world. For its proposed Kabinett Sector presentation, INKstudio will return to the two decades that followed this reopening in a historic survey of early works by six of the major pioneers of the contemporary INK art movement in China—Li Jin, Liu Dan, Zheng Chongbin, Li Huasheng, Yang Jiechang and Xu Bing. Although the subject of numerous institutional retrospective surveys in China over the past ten years, this will be the first time China Post-Opening INK art from the pivotal 1980’s and 1990’s will be presented as a curated program at an international art fair.
Exhibited works will include the early figurative works of China’s most important living literati landscape artist Liu Dan (b. 1953) before and after his immigration to the United States in 1981; early processual grid paintings of Li Huasheng (b. 1944) that document his transition from traditional landscapist to conceptual minimalist around 1989-90; artist proofs dating from 1987-90 from the installation Book from the Sky the first language-based Conceptual artwork by Xu Bing (b. 1955); early experimental figure paintings by Li Jin (b. 1958) during his formative years living and teaching in Tibet during the 1980s and early 1990s; early calligraphic abstractions by Yang Jiechang (b. 1956) that lead up to his seminal series One Hundred Layers of Ink which he debuted at the 1989 exhibition Les Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou in Paris; and early ink and acrylic biomorphic abstractions by Zheng Chongbin (b. 1961) from his pioneering 1988 solo exhibition at the Shanghai Art Museum. Although the subject of numerous institutional retrospective surveys in China over the past ten years, this will be the first time China Post-Opening INK art from the pivotal 1980s and 1990s will be presented as a curated program at an international art fair.
It is worth noting that while all six artists are drawing from a two-thousand-year-old history of brush-and-ink artistic practice to create contemporary art in China Post-Opening, each artist is responding in highly personalized ways to completely distinctive and disparate conceptual concerns. These concerns include the role of figuration in contemporary art (Li Jin); what it means to create Post-Modern art with plural art histories (Liu Dan); how art can convey an ontology based on organic processes and an epistemology based on subjective experience (Zheng Chongbin); how to reduce art to an index of embodied, consciousness process (Li Huasheng); deconstructing calligraphy into a daily practice of discursive self-determination (Yang Jiechang); and reconstructing the relationship between language, picturing, minds and world (Xu Bing). Given the disparate nature of these conceptual concerns and the exploratory nature of formative, early works, we should expect the visual strategies of each artist to be commensurately diverse.
