All in the Name of Tradition: Ink Medium in Contemporary Chinese Art (original) (raw)
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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 The essay is unpublished.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.)
Spilt Ink: Aesthetic Globalization and Contemporary Chinese Art
The British Journal of Aesthetics, 2012
In response to globalization, is there to be a single, homogeneous set of aesthetic values governing the production and consumption of art? The article focuses on a newcomer to globalized contemporary art, China. It suggests that artworld art (encompassed by the artworld institutions of commerce, museums, and the academy) is far from the only art currently produced. Art beyond the artworld, whether commercial or religious, is important to many people worldwide. It describes four kinds of art currently made in China. Three are artworld art (Modernist, traditional, and avant-garde), one is non-artworld (mass commercial). Connections exist among them. Further, it argues that practices in all four conform to expectations globally that Chinese art of all kinds should exemplify imitation, emulation, and copying. Such conformity entails what Winnie Wong has termed 'staging Chineseness'. The article concludes with an examination of this process in two recent exhibitions before proposing that a proliferation of a variety of values is unavoidable while contemporary artworld practitioners continue to introduce local concerns, and while the self-claimed high status of artworld art is progressively challenged by the vitality worldwide of non-artworld art. While some of these values are resistant to Western globalizing homogenization, others conform to it. 1. Although I hope to cast some light on aesthetic globalization, my focus is on one country: China. In recent years, many people outside China have had opportunities to see considerable quantities of contemporary Chinese art. The epicenter of what has become a global phenomenon was the China/Avant-Garde exhibition at the National Art Gallery, Beijing in 1989, co-organized by the critic and art historian Gao Minglu, now chair of the
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.
Ink in China [Essay in Exhibition Catalogue, Pera Museum, Istanbul]
Out of Ink, 2019
Before the 20th century, ink was always central to the visual and written culture of educated Chinese people. It was made and mixed, stored and treasured, decorated and collected throughout the country’s long history. Successive generations of writers and artists have written and painted with ink, seeing it as the most natural medium for self-expression. In our times, there are still many traditional artists who produce work in the classical style, in addition to those who play on the material and spiritual qualities of ink to explore new possibilities, sometimes in new media.
Chinese Contemporary Art: where it comes from, where it goes goes
Asiadémica - Revista universitaria de estudios sobre Asia oriental, 2022
I propose a tour of Chinese contemporary art starting in the 1990s and the then very important role played by foreign taste, interpretations, and markets, as well as the succession of international exhibitions it gave rise to. The dawn of the new millennium was marked by the meteoric rise to international markets and an unprecedented opening of new museums and galleries of contemporary art in China. However, after the 2008/9 financial crisis, market interest waned, and international exhibitions slowed down. Today, despite a marked experimentalism in Chinese contemporary art, it seems to convey a renewed interest in traditional culture. Finally, I analyse the ideological interpretations to which a fairly big part of contemporary artworks by Chinese artists has been subjected to by Western critics, and the deficient understanding of the term “modernity” that has been at stake. I finish trying to figure out what the future may hold for Chinese contemporary art.
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).