INK studio is proud to participate in Art Chengdu International Contemporary Art Fair from April 28 to May 2 in Chengdu. Located at booth A02, INK studio will present works by five outstanding contemporary artists, including two women artists Chen Haiyan and Tao Aimin, who express their unique artistic perspective through printmaking and installations; the renowned ink artist Li Jin’s early works from the 80s and 90s, as well as his monochrome ink paintings in the expressive xieyi style; and works by Wei Ligang and Xu Bing, who explore the traditional practice of Chinese calligraphy and the philosophy of writing in different artistic experimentations.
Born in Liaoning in 1955, Chen Haiyan, has used her artistic practice over the past thirty years to integrate the ephemeral, deeply private, fantastical world of her dreams within the fabric of contemporary China's rapidly-changing social reality by recording and publicly disseminating her dream reality through the dual traditional media of carved woodblock prints and brush and ink painting. Uniting traditional Chinese elite aesthetics with a rough vernacular quality, style and medium work seamlessly together as Chen Haiyan renders her subject matter — dream images from her unconscious — with an unparalleled sense of emotional directness. Situating Chen's work between dream and reality, the critic Amjad Majid writes that "while in Kafka's work the fantastic is employed to address the quotidian horror of everyday life, in Chen Haiyan's work it is used to shed light on its quotidian wonder." Based in Hangzhou, Chen Haiyan is currently a senior professor in the Print Department of the National Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou.
Li Jin (b. 1958 in Tianjin, China) is best known for his lush and colorful depictions of sensory pleasures in contemporary China. From 2015 onwards, Li Jin has shifted his focus on monochrome ink paintings executed in the highly expressive xieyistyle, applying spontaneous ink splashes using gigantic brushes. Dwelling in between concrete imagery and abstraction brush strokes, Li Jin’s works are extremely striking, reminiscent of the Zen paintings practiced by artists like Liang Kai, Xu Wei, and Zhu Da. Li Jin’s 2019 solo show Flesh and Boneis currently shown at INK studio Beijing. During Art Chengdu 2019, INK studio will present a selection of Li’s early works from the 80s and 90s, as well as hisxieyi style monochrome ink paintings from 2015 onwards.
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 Chengdu, INK studio will present Tao’s installations inspired by washing boards and nüshucalligraphy from Jiangyong, Hunan, in memory of the trivialized and long-forgotten stories of women’s quotidian lives.
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.
Xu Bing (b. 1955 in Chongqing) 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.
About Art Chengdu
Art Chengdu International Contemporary Art Fair is committed to becoming one of the finest art fairs in Asia and even the world. It provides quality exhibition services and strict standards for exhibitors and visitors to provide the best art fair experience.
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.
