“Ink Painting in the Sinophone World: Liu Kuo-sung’s Hong Kong Period.” In The Liu Kuo-sung Reader: Selected Texts on and by the Artist, 1950s-Present. Eds. Eugene Y. Wang, Valerie C Doran, Alan C. Yeung (Cambridge: Harvard University Press for Harvard FAS CAMLab, 2024), 125-33. (original) (raw)
Related papers
A leading figure in modern/contemporary ink painting, Liu Kuo-sung (Liu Guosong) is best known for innovative techniques with tools other than the brush. He is often identified as an artist from Taiwan, but in fact his footprints and legacy span the Sinophone world, including mainland China and Hong Kong. In this article, Liu's lesser-known but critical period in Hong Kong in the 1970s to early 1990s is examined in relation to the postwar debates that led to the term guohua (national painting) being replaced by shuimohua (ink painting).
A New Definition of Chinese Ink Painting
The idea here is to provide a clear, arguable definition, in order to clarify some of the ongoing discussions about what counts as ink painting. These debates are especially important given the claim that Chinese ink painting should be considered as the central Chinese contemporary art. It has a 3,000 year history, and it is not centrally or necessarily influenced by the West like so much Chinese art of the last few generations. One of the things standing in the way of a general acceptance of ink painting is that there is no general agreement about what counts as ink painting: is it the use of ink? Rice paper? Traditional techniques? Can photographs influenced by ink painting count? Can Gu Wenda's paintings count? Xu Bing's calligraphy? Ai Weiwei's architecture, furniture, or painted vases? The definition proposed here is non-visual: I suggest that it is helpful to think of ink painting as not dependent on any particular materials, but rather on the quality and nature of its references to the past. In that sense, much of Chinese contemporary art is neither ink painting nor especially Chinese; and much contemporary Chinese ink painting does not use ink, paper, or traditional brush marks. The essay is unpublished. It was commissioned, fully edited, paid, and then rejected, for an exhibition of contemporary ink painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012-13. (It was rejected because it is more art criticism than art history. Exhibition catalog essays for larger museums need to appear as art history and scholarship, and not as criticism or theory, even if the exhibition they accompany is itself a critical or theoretical contribution.)
All in the Name of Tradition: Ink Medium in Contemporary Chinese Art
Ink remix: contemporary art from mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, 2014
Chinese ink medium has suddenly become all the rage. For some time, ink painting did not quite make the face of contemporary Chinese art. Now, it is poised to do so. A combination of factors accounts for this sudden surge. Outside of China, international curators and critics, either out of the inertia of 1990s' identity politics or fearful of the blitz of sweeping globalisation, are eager to look for something authentically 'Chinese'. In China, there is a stocktake taking place of the legacy of the 1980s, which was a historical turning-point in recent memory. It was the time when the country was trying to unshackle from the previous decades of Maoist ideological stricture. The reopening of China to the world made the Chinese painfully aware of the debilitating consequences of decades of isolation from the world and its pathetic entrapment in a time warp. Modernisation (xiandaihua) was the collective aspiration and driving force. This essentially meant Westernisation. The 1980s was therefore a heady time. Every self-respecting college student was reading Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud and Camus, among others. Critiquing Chinese tradition was a shared intellectual
Re-Negotiating Chinese Ink in Contemporary Singapore
MA Asian Art Histories Thesis, 2019
[This online version of the thesis is presented without the interview transcripts. Images have been converted to monochrome and have their resolutions reduced.] This study adopts cultural identity as a framework to analyse and discuss contemporary Chinese ink art in Singapore. While much literature has been written about the classical Chinese ink heritage from China and its influence and development in Singapore, contemporary Singaporean Chinese ink art have begun to emerge as responses towards the classical Chinese ink heritage. The study examines how contemporary Singaporean Chinese ink artists negotiate classical Chinese ink heritage as a cultural basis for their art making. This study attempts to describe their efforts as a distinction from the classical Chinese ink heritage and yet retains a sense of cultural familiarity. The study reviews literature on classical Chinese ink heritage and its development in Singapore to set the context for the contemporisation of Chinese ink art in Singapore. The study then establishes three key parameters for the examination of the four case studies: the sense of familiarity, extension of material, and fusion of Chinese and Western thought. The study describes the sense of familiarity as a cultural association with the iconography of classical Chinese ink heritage. The extension of material would encompass the application of the traditional Chinese ink medium and material, as well as unconventional materials, in artworks. The fusion of Chinese and Western thought would reference the synthesis of medium, philosophies, ideas, narratives and cultural dilemmas as perceived by Western educated Singaporean Chinese ink artists. The study has visually and contextually analysed Ling Yang Chang’s Taking a Break, Hong Sek Chern’s Rolled/Unrolled, Lim Choon Jin’s Rolling Mist in Highlands and June Lee Yu Juan’s Lost in Translation as contemporary Chinese ink artworks fitting these parameters. This study concludes that cultural familiarity is the key component for understanding contemporary Singaporean Chinese ink art, while the extension of material and fusion of Chinese and Western thought are to be considered as supporting influences towards cultural familiarity. With these parameters, the cultural negotiation of these contemporary Singaporean Chinese ink artists are thus made clear as distinct but familiar from the cultural basis of the classical Chinese ink heritage. The study hopes to expand the discourse of Singaporean Chinese ink through the examination of contemporary artworks, and to propose the usage of the three parameters of familiarity, extension and fusion for the study of contemporary Chinese ink in Singapore. The study proposes that future research into contemporary Singaporean Chinese ink can be expanded through the coverage of more artists and how the medium can be used in artistic production.
The China Journal, 2011
Western understandings of the trajectory of Chinese art following Mao’s death in 1976 have been hampered by several factors. A persistent element is the propensity of Western art historians and critics to impose Western historical patterns, esthetic standards and critical methods to the analysis of Chinese art, its production and expression. This tendency was exacerbated by China’s closing to the West after 1949, which discouraged scholarship and Chinese language study and resulted in a 30-year hiatus in scholarly communications and firsthand knowledge—a situation that invited imagination and speculation that favored an obsessive preference in the West for art that could be interpreted as politically subversive. When China re-opened in the 1980s, scholars of contemporary Chinese art faced the further problem of trying to make sense of an anarchic disarray of theories and practices rushing in to fill the vacuum afforded by the collapse of Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Zedong ideology. The prolific but scattered writings and publications by Chinese artists, critics and theorists were accessible only to those few who already possessed a high level of Chinese language facility including the specially nuanced vocabulary of the art world, as well as a wide-ranging and balanced network of interpersonal contacts. This volume addresses the need for wider access to primary Chinese sources by readers of English.