INK studio is proud to participate in Art Basel Hong Kong from March 29 to 31 in Hong Kong , with VIP preview on March 27. Located at booth 3D08, INK studio presents works by four Chinese artists, featuring Li Huasheng, Li Jin, Xu Bing, and Zheng Chongbin. Also included is a selection of works by two prolific Korean artists, Jeong Gwanghee and Kim Jongku.
Following Li Huasheng’s well-acclaimed debut at Art Basel Hong Kong 2016 (The New York Times,Artsy, Blouin Artinfo, Observer), INK studio’s 2019 presentation features his iconic grid paintings in commemoration of the artist’s recent passing. 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. His gird paintings have been featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Art Museum of China, Shanghai Biennale, Guangdong Museum of Art, among others.
Li Jin (b. 1958 in Tianjin, China) is best known for his lush and colorful depictions of sensory pleasures in contemporary China. But his art has always had a spiritual undertone, perhaps even a spiritual purpose. In 1984, inspired by the examples of van Gogh and Gauguin, he went to Tibet in search for an authentic life and primal connection to nature. There he began to reflect on the limits of corporeal existence. Drawn to the religiosity and the sense of time and history in Tibetan culture, he would sojourn twice again in the region, but would gradually come to recognize its essential alienness. INK studio’s presentation at Art Basel Hong Kong extends from his concurrent solo exhibition at INK studio Beijing, and uncovers his artistic development during the 1980’s and 90’s, particularly the profound impact of his self-exiles in Tibet.
Xu Bing (b. 1955 in Chongqing) is widely recognized as one of the leading conceptual artists of language and semiotics working today. At Art Basel Hong Kong, INK studio presentsa new work from the series Background Story, in which Xu Bing models each of his compositions after a well-known, historic masterwork, but renders them using only “non-art” materials such as dried plants and torn bits of plastic sheets, light and shadow. Also featured is a set of four Landscriptlithographs created after four seventeenth-century landscape paintings in the Suzhou Museum, printed in two colors from 35 plates on Entrada natural rag.Inhis Landscriptseries, Xu Bing reinvents the relationship between Chinese traditional painting and calligraphy by substituting the images of Chinese written characters for painted depictions of natural forms. INK studio will also showcase the original page spreads from Xu Bing’s wood-block and moveable-type printing of Book from the Sky, which is one of his best-known works and earned him international recognition in the late 1980s and the 1990s.
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. The artist’s profile has risen rapidly over the past several years, spurred by his first museum solo exhibition in the UnitedStatesin Asia Society Texas Center’s Yoshio Taniguchi-designed gallery, and site-specific permanentinstallation at Kyoto’s oldest Zen Temple Ryosokuin. 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.
Jeong Gwanghee’s (b. 1967) works are composed of strips of Korean traditional paper folded and stacked side by side. The surface is then covered by ink dots and abstract brushstrokes, blurring and deconstructing the meaning of the text and images on paper.
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.
About Art Basel Hong Kong
Art Basel Hong Kong, held at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, features premier galleries from Asia and beyond. Underlining Art Basel's commitment to the region, half of the participating galleries once again have exhibition spaces in Asia and Asia-Pacific. The show provides an in-depth overview of the region’s diversity through both historical material and cutting-edge works by established and emerging artists.
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.
