INKstudio at West Bund 2021

BOOTH  A212

West Bund Art Center, Building A

INKstudio will explore INK as the basis for an international contemporary art rooted in East Asian art history and artistic practices.

In collaboration with The Li Huasheng Art Foundation, INKstudio will present a selection of Li Huasheng’s ground-breaking grid and line paintings where the artist reinvents INK as a practice of meditative self-cultivation, liberation and self-transformation. All sale proceeds will fund the charitable mission of the Foundation to support INK as a medium and language for the creation of contemporary art.

The subject of a major retrospective at the Zhejiang Art Museum, From Inception: Wang Dongling 60 Years of Calligraphy, Wang Dongling explores INK as performance in a range of media including calligraphy, photography, performance art and new digital media. For West Bund, INKstudio will present a selection of Wang Dongling’s kuangcao “wild cursive” and luanshu “chaos script” calligraphies.

Wang Tiande represents a critical turn from the experimental INK art practices of the post-Cultural Revolution 80’s to a deep engagement with East Asian art history through the classical landscape tradition. Connoisseurs of classical landscape find Wang Tiande’s incensed-burned, multi-layered contemporary landscapes deeply satisfying and yet by burning away his own brushwork, Wang Tiande takes away the primary criteria by which we traditionally judge literati painting. INKstudio will present Want Tiande’s monumental treatment of the Northern Song landscape, Fine Snow Entering the Woods, 2019.

Chinese artists are not alone in exploring the use of INK as a means for creating a distinctively East Asian form of contemporary art. Korean INK artists Jeong Gwanghee and Lee In, each in their own distinctive way, explore the relationship between language-based thinking and non-language embodied experience and between artistic practice and enlightenment experience.

In Jeong Gwang Hee’s The Way of Reflection series, artistic process, meditative practice, the written character and INK create a space above or outside of language where human imagination confers meaning to our conscious experience. INKstudio will also debut Thoughts Transcend the Object, 2021, Jeong Gwang Hee’s monumental work based on the ancient pictograph for dao 道 “way” or “path” where he redefines the relationship between pictographic image, language, abstract form and experience.

In his Black, Something series Lee In reconstructs the relationship between idea, experience, image, the written word and text—in both Chinese hanzi and Korean hangul. Taking various forms—including mixed media on canvas and ceramic and ink on hanji paper—Lee In explores the themes of solace, communication and being together with the world.