"Ink Painting in the Sinophone World: Liu Guosong's Hong Kong Period." Art in Translation 11. 1 (2019): 22-44. (original) (raw)
Related papers
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 The essay is unpublished.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.)
Ars Orientalis, 2018
Many Chinese painters working in the medium of ink painting, or guohua, in the 1930s saw their medium at a historical turning point. They perceived a necessity to strengthen ink painting conceptually and formally in order for it to persist in a globalizing modern world. This essay studies how modern ink painters positioned their works through both an analysis of their texts and a study of reproductions in publications related to the Chinese Painting Association (Zhongguo Huahui). Many painters worked as editors for book companies, journals, or pictorials, and they were highly conscious of the possibilities and limitations of particular reproduction techniques. An analysis of the editorial arrangements, choices of printing techniques, and textual framings of the reproduced works sheds light on the social structures of the Chinese art world of the 1920s and 30s, and on the role that the editors envisioned for themselves, their associations, and modern ink painting in general. According to its mission statement, the Chinese Painting Association (Zhongguo Huahui 中國畫會), founded in 1932 by several prominent guohua 國畫 (" national painting ") artists working in Shanghai, had three main goals: " (1) to develop the age-old art of our nation; (2) to publicize it abroad and raise our international artistic stature; (3) with a spirit of mutual assistance on the part of the artists, to plan for a [financially] secure system. " 1 One of the activities by which the association aimed to fulfill the first two of these goals was the publication of a journal, Guohua yuekan 國畫月刊, or National Painting Monthly, and of a catalogue of works by its members across the country, titled Zhongguo xiandai minghua huikan 中國現代名畫彙刊 (Collection of Famous Modern Chinese Paintings). 2 The texts as well as the illustrations in the journal and the catalogue reflected the programmatic impulse that led to the foundation of the Chinese Painting Association. Because it became the largest art organization in Republican China and the only one officially registered with the government, its key publications are of crucial importance for a differentiated understanding of how artists working in the medium of guohua defined their practice visually and theoretically. Moreover, these artists positioned their artistic practice with regard to other media or other historical moments, most notably in relation to " Western " (i.e., European) painting and its global transformations. This aspect is
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 purpose of this study is to present the work of the contemporary Chinese avant-garde painter Zhang Yu in relation to Experimental Ink and Wash Painting in mainland China and his contribution to this movement. This artist is the founder and ideological leader of the movement, whose views strongly influenced the avant-garde contemporary ink painting in all its forms. His work has gradually moved from monochrome ink paintings, through paintings on glass and on other materials, to installation, but his work is still characterised by certain constant philosophical and aesthetic concepts. Sources From a relatively large amount of literature written about contemporary Chinese art, only a small part deals with ink painting, that stands and stood aside from the avant-garde movements that journeyed Chinese art and it is a rewarding and grateful source for art critics and theorists. Overall there is much less material that deals with contemporary Chinese ink painting, it is a topic that interests more Chinese critics than the world public. However, there are books dealing with these issues. Despite the above mentioned facts, I had no significant problems with the lack of material. In addition, for * This study is published within the VEGA No. 2/0102/16 grant project.