Bingyi: Taihang Rhapsody
Co-Curators: Craig Yee, Chris Wan
Dates: 1.14-3.08, 2026
Venue: Asia Society Hong Kong Center, 9 Justice Drive, Admiralty, Hong Kong
The exhibition presents Bingyi's latest grand, speculative narrative about art and its relationship to history and politics as reimagined from a woman's point of view.
The exhibition is presented as the long-lost artworks of Hua, the fictional Northern Song Matriarch of Painting, rediscovered and "archaeologically excavated" by the artist Bingyi from a Song Dynasty temple site in the Taihang Mountains — partly based on historical clues and partly on personal imagination. In Bingyi's series of speculative reconstructions, Hua is not only a pioneering female artist in Chinese art history but also a visionary philosopher and political thinker. Independent of the great masters of the Song Dynasty landscape painting and the subsequent male literati painting tradition, Hua created an alternative aesthetic system that de-centered the patriarchal, Confucian, brush- and ego-centered mode of literati landscape painting and re-centered the expressive possibilities of brush-and-ink on water, on Taoism, on nature, and on the creative experiences of women.
The exhibition unfolds across the five chambers of the Chantal Miller Gallery, simulating the five main halls of Hua's Taihang Mountain temple complex. Yet the authorship of the presented works constantly shifts between the artist Bingyi and her fictional persona Hua — by challenging the boundary between the two. The exhibition invites us to contemplate: What constitutes true authorship in ink art? How can we reframe the relationship between historical and contemporary ink art? Where lies the boundary between figuration and abstraction in the language of painting, between the material and spiritual in artistic experience, between fact and fiction in our construction of history and, ultimately, between the dualities within the self?
