May 11, 2022 (Palo Alto, CA) - Qualia Contemporary Art is pleased to announce Beyond Ink, a group exhibition of contemporary ink art curated by XiaozeXie. Works by artists Yang Jiechang, Zhang Yu, Zheng Chongbin, and Wang Tiandewill present a wide and varied scope of contemporary works that explore the materiality, history, and potential of ink as an artistic medium. The performative application of ink, the time-based process of meditative mark-making, and the sculptural dimension of the material are revealed in each artist’s work, and in the dialogues between them. Beyond Ink will be open to the public from May 28 – July 15, 2022, with an opening celebration hosted on May 28 from 4:00 – 7:00 PM PST.

Providing context for this exhibition, curator XiaozeXie states: “Traditional ink painting carries the weight of the accumulated history of painting and calligraphy in China, if not in all of Asia, articulating its profound philosophical roots, cultural significance, and aesthetic characteristics, and thereby, occupies a monumental space in Asian art and public cultural consciousness. As modern and contemporary art has diversified, developed, and drastically changed, ink painting has remained a topic of lively debate and a medium that oscillates between tradition and innovation. Infatuation with, or rebellion against, the aesthetic inertia of ink painting has shaped the development of Chinese contemporary art, a complex dynamic that confronts almost every Chinese artist.” 

The exhibition title, Beyond Ink, reflects the curator’s emphasis on artists working with ink in innovative and unconventional ways — beyond traditional ink painting, but beyond modern ink painting as well. While Yang Jiechang (b. 1956), Zhang Yu (b. 1957), Wang Tiande (b. 1960), and Zheng Chongbin (b. 1961) come from the same generation of artists and are unified by their shared Chinese heritage, these commonalities make the breadth of their collective work all the more significant. Despite the similarity of the artists’ origins, the differences between their respective practices underscore the unique capacity of ink to serve as a performative, documentary, sculptural, and/or time-based medium in the hands of each artist. 

Yang Jiechang's "Hundred Layers of Ink" appears in various books on Chinese contemporary art, and has become a paradigmatic work in the field. Viewed in person, the thick and monochromatic surface reflects a muted, cool light, reminiscent of a mysterious ore dug out of the ground, or the raw graphite left behind melted down pencils; the meridians extend vertically and horizontally, like sediment on the floor of a dried out ocean of ink. The transparent, subtle, and lyrical beauty of traditional ink and wash is lost in this work, but what remains is ink presented as object, an object that whispers solemn poetry evoking a sense of death. He is well versed in the medium of brush and ink, and fluent in traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy theory, but the "Hundred Layers of Ink" series is an experiment in abandoning his academic training. He does not leave any visible negative space but instead fills those spaces with layers of ink until all traditional elements are subsumed in the blackness. The anatomy of influences on Yang Jiechang blends elements from traditional Chinese culture and Western modernism.

Zhang Yu's works are rooted in the concept of abandonment, as expressed by Chinese philosopher Laozi, "in pursuit of the Way, actions are reduced daily." It is through the process of abandonment that Zhang brings himself closer to the core of Chinese philosophy. He abandons the "brush" as writing implement, lines as subject, and instead uses the techniques of rubbing, smearing, and spraying to create meditative spaces in which to contemplate the majesty of the cosmos. In the "Fingerprints" series, Zhang not only abandons brushwork, but the brush itself, replacing it with his fingers, and using them to generate works that evoke the symbiotic relationship between the physical, the mental, and the temporal. In some of the works, the artist forgoes the medium of ink entirely; he dips his fingers in water and leaves subtle, uneven marks on the surface of the rice paper. Each "fingerprint" work is composed with no clear beginning or end and serves as a record of Zhang Yu's Zen-like self-cultivation, as an imprint to register a particular period in his life.

Like the other artists whose work features in this exhibition, Wang Tiande is one of the most important experimental ink artists in China. Traditional themes and media are visible in his works: landscapes, calligraphy, stele rubbings, and album paintings. The remote and muted qualities of traditional Chinese paintings are palpable, but Wang does not intend to fully "return to tradition". Wang Tiande layers sheets of paper atop one another, inscribes the bottom sheet with calligraphy or landscape in ink, and burns the transparent top sheet with incense to form multi-layered compositions and achieve subtle visual effects. The hollowed-out images and words formed in the process of burning rice paper evoke a kind of absence, a disappearing cultural memory; every element in his work is obfuscated. A chasm forms between the past and the time and space in which we live as tradition is pushed into the dark depths of our memory.

Zheng Chongbin is the only one of the four exhibitors who received formal training in Western contemporary art. Although Zheng is famous for his abstract ink and acrylic paintings on xuan paper and is dedicated to traditional media, his artistic vision is broad and multicultural. His work reveals the influence of global contemporary art. Zheng conducts extensive experiments with materials, scale, space, and techniques, with a remarkably open mind and dynamism. He employs ink and acrylic to create rich textural effects reminiscent of snow and water, forests and stones, intending to represent unpredictable forces of nature. Zheng disassembles and reassembles various elements, allowing them to intersperse, collide, and layer. He juxtaposes and contrasts artificial geometric forms with natural visual elements, forming varied complex structures, each bearing a unique visual character. In recent years, Zheng Chongbin has boldly contributed to the discourse of contemporary culture—expanding his artistic vocabulary, fusing the flow of nature with the solidity of architecture, mediating space and light, and exploring fundamental issues of vision and perception and the various relationships among humans, nature, environment, and technology.

The selected artists in Beyond Ink are not interested in conforming to the well-worn comforts of established ink painting traditions, nor are they concerned with the lyricism, serendipity, and delicate handling that characterizes the majority of ink art, new and old. Beyond Ink exemplifies the experimentation and revitalization of a storied medium rife with meaning, through the expansive work of four contemporary artists. 

Curator XiaozeXie writes, “Thirty years after leaving China, I stand before the work of these artists in the United States, where they are thoroughly recontextualized, and I am deeply fascinated by the sense of strangeness accompanying the shift in time and space. The four artists I selected for this exhibition, Yang Jiechang (b. 1956), Zhang Yu (b. 1957), Wang Tiande (b. 1960) and Zheng Chongbin (b. 1961), have been experimenting with ink painting since the 1980s. I cannot and do not intend to conduct an art historical analysis of Chinese experimental ink painting, nor can I discuss comprehensively the rich oeuvres of each artist. This dialogue may be incomplete, subjective, and at times, discursive. However, it is not intended to function as a summary judgment but rather as an exchange of ideas and experiences between practitioners.”

About the Curator

XiaozeXie谢晓泽

(b. 1966 in Guangdong, China)

XiaozeXie is an internationally recognized artist and the Paul L. & Phyllis Wattis Professor of Art at Stanford University. He is the recipient of the 2022 Asia Game Changer West Award from the Asia Society. Xie received his Master of Fine Art degrees from the Central Academy of Arts & Design in Beijing and the University of North Texas. Xie has exhibited extensively in the US and internationally, and his recent solo exhibitions include “Objects of Evidence” at the Asia Society Museum in New York City (2019-20) and “Eyes On” at the Denver Art Museum (2017-18). His work is in the permanent collection of such institutions as the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Denver Art Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, San Francisco Asian Art Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, and the Oakland Museum of California. Xie received the Painters and Sculptors Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2013), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2003), and artist awards from the Dallas Museum of Art and Phoenix Art Museum. As a curator, XiaozeXie co-curated with Dan Mills “Regeneration: Contemporary Chinese Art from China and the US” which toured the US from 2004 to 2007; he organized “Fragmentary Narratives: Fang Lijun, XieXiaoze, Yang Jiechang and Yang Shaobin” at the Changsha City Museum and Stanford Art Gallery in 2015-16. Xie curated the inaugural exhibition “Catastrophic Beauty: Art in the Age of the Anthropocene” in 2020 and “Resonance: Terry Berlier, Paul DeMarinis, Guillermo Galindo and Hu Xiangcheng” in 2021, both at Qualia Contemporary Art.

About the Artists

Zhang Yu 张羽 

(b. 1959 in Tianjin, China)

Zhang Yu graduated from the Tianjin Academy of Arts and Crafts in 1988. Throughout his artistic career, he has been engaged with the language of art and experimental ink painting, contributing to and reforming the discursive boundaries of ink art. His early series, Divine Light, became internationally recognized when they were included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition, Ink Art: Past As Present in Contemporary China, in 2013. The artist is also well known for his Fingerprint and installation works, which have been exhibited in major exhibitions in China, Taiwan, Europe, and America. His recent solo exhibitions include the HOW Art Museum, Shanghai; Yuan Art Museum, Beijing; Art Centre of Providence University, Taichung; Alisan Fine Arts, Hong Kong; PIFO Gallery, Beijing; Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou; and more. His works have been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China; Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong; Benetton Museum, Venice, Italy; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; and Chinese Culture Center, San Francisco, USA.

Zheng Chongbin郑重宾

(b. 1961 in Shanghai, China)

Zheng Chongbin was educated as a classical Chinese figurative painter at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, where he taught for four years after graduation in 1984. Acclaimed as one of China’s preeminent young experimental ink painters in the 1980s, he mounted his first solo exhibition at the Shanghai Museum of Art in 1988. In 1989, he received a fellowship from the San Francisco Art Institute to study installation, performance, and conceptual art, receiving his MFA in 1991. A resident of the San Francisco Bay Area for over three decades, Zheng is inspired by the region's distinctive atmospheric and environmental effects and rich ecologies, as well as by the California light and space movement. He has exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Hong Kong Museum of Art; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Chambers Fine Art Gallery, New York; UOB Art Gallery/West Bund Art Center, Shanghai; Ink Studio, Beijing; Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York; Orange County Museum of Art, California; and more.

Zheng’s work can be found in the collections, among others, of the British Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Chicago Art Institute, the Orange County Museum of Art in California, M+ in Hong Kong, the Daimler Art Collection in Stuttgart, Germany, the DSL Collection in France, and the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. Zheng is the subject of a documentary film, The Enduring Passion of Ink, and an in-depth monograph, Zheng Chongbin: Impulse, Matter, Form, edited by Britta Erickson and distributed by D.A.P. in the United States.

Yang Jiechang杨诘苍

(b. 1956 in Foshan, Guangdong Province, China) 

Yang Jiechang graduated from the Chinese painting department at the Foshan Folk-art Institute in Guangdong Province, China in 1982. For the next six years, he was a teacher at the Guangzhou Fine Arts Academy in Guangzhou, China, and in 1988, he moved to Europe, where he has remained, living between Paris and a village near Heidelberg. In 1989, he participated in both the seminal Contemporary Chinese Art exhibition at the National Art Museum in Beijing and the equally paradigm-changing exhibition Les Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou. Yang was featured in Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in 1993 and in the 50th edition of the Venice Biennale in 2003. In the past five years, Yang’s work has been included in numerous international exhibitions, including the Lyon Biennial, Musée de Dinard, MSK and S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium, Palazzo Grassi, Fondation F. Pinault, Venice, Shanghai Biennale, Hong Kong Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum, New York, and most recently Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. 

Among other places, Yang’s work can be found in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn; Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Stanford; Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley; The World Bank, Washington; Rockefeller Foundation, New York; Ministry of Culture, France; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong; Hong Kong University Art Museum, Hong Kong; Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou; Chengdu Museum of Art, Chengdu; Shenzhen Fine Art Institute, Shenzhen; Fukuoka Art Museum, Fukuoka; Sonje Museum of Contemporary Art, Kyongju, Korea; Museum for Arts and Crafts, Hamburg; Annie Wong Art Foundation, Vancouver; Swatch Collection, Switzerland; François Pinault Foundation, France; Ullens Foundation, Switzerland; Yageo Art Foundation, Taiwan; and Eslite Inc., Taiwan. Yang is the subject of the documentary film “Yang Jiechang’s Gu and Qi” in the series The Enduring Passion of Ink, directed and produced by Britta Erickson and filmed by Richard Widmer. Yang also is the subject of the forthcoming in-depth monograph Yang Jiechang: 道可道非 No Way All Ways, edited by Britta Erickson and with essays by Martina Köppel-Yang and NatalineColonello, distributed internationally by D.A.P.

Wang Tiande王天德 

(b. 1960 in Shanghai, China) 

Wang Tiande graduated from the Chinese Painting Department of Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now the China Academy of Art) in 1988 and later obtained his doctorate degree from its Department of Calligraphy. He is currently a professor at the Fudan University in Shanghai. Celebrated for his revolutionary takes on traditional Chinese art in China and abroad, Wang Tiande is best known for his burned landscapes, consisting of a painted underlayer and an overlayer burned with cigarettes or incense sticks. More recently, he has incorporated into the landscapes rubbings of famous ancient steles from his own collection. In their fusion of the fleeting and the timeless, Wang Tiande’s works meditate on creation and destruction. They are both elegies to the past and celebrations of its present persistence.

Wang has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in major galleries and museums worldwide, including Chambers Fine Art, New York, Alisan Fine Art, Hong Kong, Spencer Museum of Art, Kansas, University of Sydney, Australia, Suzhou Museum, Suzhou, Today Art Museum, Beijing, The Palace Museum, Fujian and Beijing, Nanhai Art Center, San Francisco, Guangdong Art Museum, Guangzhou, National Art Museum of China, Beijing, and Suning Museum of Art, Shanghai, among others. In 2006, Wang Tiande was exhibited in Brush and Ink, which was the first exhibition of contemporary Chinese painters held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. His work is in the collections of The British Museum, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum; Asian Art Museum of San Francisco; The UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas; Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art; The National Art Museum of China, Beijing; Shanghai Museum of Art; Suzhou Museum; Today Art Museum, Beijing; Guangdong Museum of Art; Shenzhen Art Museum; and Hong Kong Museum of Art.

Curator Essay

Beyond Ink

XieXiaoze

The lingering charm and unique beauty of ink on rice paper lies in the intimate familiarity Chinese artists have with it, as though it were a meaningful piece of music we are all able to recognize. Traditional ink painting carries the weight of the accumulated history of painting and calligraphy in China, if not in all of Asia, articulating its profound philosophical roots, cultural significance, and aesthetic characteristics and thereby, occupies a monumental space in Asian art and public cultural consciousness. As modern and contemporary art has diversified, developed, and drastically changed, ink painting has remained a topic of lively debate and a medium that oscillates between tradition and innovation. A generation of Chinese artists who studied abroad in the early 20th century, such as Xu Beihong (1895-1953), Wu Zuoren (1908-97), and Lin Fengmian (1900-91), returned to China and resumed working with a brush, becoming a driving force for continuity of Chinese painting traditions and for radical innovation. Since the inception of the "’85 New Wave" movement, experimental ink painting has emerged as a unique field. Infatuation with or rebellion against the aesthetic inertia of ink painting has shaped the development of Chinese contemporary art. Almost every Chinese artist is confronted with this complex dynamic.The four artists I selected for this exhibition, Yang Jiechang (b. 1956), Zhang Yu (b. 1957), Wang Tiande (b. 1960) and Zheng Chongbin (b. 1961), have been experimenting with ink painting since the 1980s. I cannot and do not intend to conduct an art historical analysis of Chinese experimental ink painting nor can I discuss comprehensively the rich oeuvres of each artist. However, small gallery exhibitions provide opportunities to engage in dialogues about a limited set of works. This dialogue may be incomplete, subjective and at times, discursive. It is not intended to function as a summary judgment but rather as an exchange of ideas and experiences between practitioners.

Thirty years after leaving China, I stand before the work of these artists in the United States, where they are thoroughly recontextualized  and I am deeply fascinated by the sense of strangeness accompanying the shift in time and space. Yang Jiechang's "Thousand Layers of Ink" appears in various books on Chinese contemporary art and has become a token image of this field. Viewed in person, the thick and monochromatic surface reflects a muted, cool light, reminiscent of a mysterious ore dug out of the ground, or the raw graphite left behind melted down pencils; the meridians extend vertically and horizontally, like sediment on the floor of dried out ocean of ink. The transparent, subtle, and lyrical beauty of traditional ink and wash is lost in this work, but what remains is ink presented as object, an object that whispers solemn poetry evoking a sense of of death. Stylistically it shares affinities with the work of Spanish abstract painter, Antoni Tàpies and American artist, Mark Tobey. Yang Jiechang picked up a brush at the age of three, studied calligraphy and traditional painting throughout his youth, and was admitted to the Chinese Painting Department of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts for undergraduate study. In 1989 Yang Jiechang immigrated to France, where his work dramatically changed. He is well versed in the medium of brush and ink and fluent in traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy theory, but the "Thousand Layers of Ink" series is an experiment in abandoning his academic training. He does not leave any visible negative space but instead fills those spaces with layers of ink until all traditional elements are subsumed in the blackness. During a recent conversation, Yang mentioned he spent ten years working on "Thousand Layers of Ink," completing the series in 1999. During the long working process, he was subconsciously influenced by "stele aesthetics,"—incised calligraphy and the feeling of intimidation inspired by imposing monuments. Other inspiration is gleaned from Empress Wu Zetian's “Wordless Stone Stele” and the notion of the "airtight” from Chinese painting theory, which manifests in his work. The anatomy of influences on Yang Jiechang blends elements from traditional Chinese culture and Western modernism.

In Zhang Yu's works, we also witness a kind of abandonment as expressed by Chinese philosopher, Laozi: "in pursuit of the Way, actions are reduced daily." It is through the process of abandonment that Zhang brings himself closer to the core of Chinese philosophy. Zhang Yu began working on his "Divine Light"[lingguang] series in the mid-1990s, completing the work in the early 2000s. He abandoned the "brush" as writing implement, lines as subject, and instead used the techniques of rubbing, smearing, and spraying to create meditative spaces in which to contemplate the majesty of the cosmos. He reduced traditional elements to minimalist forms of circle and square, which became a typical motif in contemporary ink painting. In the "Fingerprints" series from the same period, he not only abandoned brushwork, but the brush itself, replacing it with his fingers, using them to generate works intended to evoke the symbiotic relationship between the physical, the mental, and the temporal. In some of the works the artist foregoes the medium of ink entirely; he dips his fingers in water and leaves subtle uneven marks on the surface of the rice paper. This exhibition features recent works from Zhang Yu's "Fingerprint" series, including light ink and rouge paintings. Each "fingerprint" work is composed with no clear beginning or end and serves as a record of Zhang Yu's Zen-like self-cultivation, as an imprint to register a particular period in his life. The works are characterized by the language of modernism but also colored by Eastern philosophy. Zhang Yu's recent installations integrate specific spaces and sites, are imbued with a palpable sense of ritual, and carry broad cultural implications. "Tea Feeding" is exemplary of this series of installations. Traces of tea flow over the mouth of the round bowl and along the rice paper, mirroring the action of serving tea that is at once both mundane and spiritual.

Like the other artists whose work features in this exhibition, Wang Tiande is one of the most important experimental ink artists in China. Traditional themes and media are visible in his works: landscapes, calligraphy, stele rubbings, and album paintings. The remote and subtle qualities of traditional Chinese paintings are palpable, but Wang does not intend to fully "return to tradition". Wang Tiande layers sheets of paper atop one another, inscribes the bottom sheet with calligraphy or landscape in ink and burns the transparent top sheet with incense to form multi-layered compositions and achieve subtle visual effects. The hollowed-out images and words formed in the process of burning rice paper evoke a kind of absence, a disappearing cultural memory; every element in his work is obfuscated. A chasm forms between the past and the time and space in which we live as tradition is pushed into the dark depths of our memory. This fracture and dislocation may represent the decline of traditional art as it faces contemporary challenges. Wang Tiande's installations and three-dimensional works dating circa 1995 are more visceral whereas his graphic works of the past two decades have maintained a serene and refined temperament. Perhaps he is no longer interested in revolutionary or subversive gestures, choosing to focus on the continuation and renewal of tradition through restoration, compromise, and transformation, which he does in a profoundly cultivated manner.

After graduating from the Chinese Painting Department of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, Zheng Chongbin left China and came to the United States in 1988. He studied installation, performance and conceptual art at the San Francisco Art Institute and completed a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1991. He is the only one of the four exhibitors who received formal training in Western contemporary art. Although Zheng Chongbin is famous for his abstract ink and acrylic paintings on xuan paper and is dedicated to traditional media, his artistic vision is broad and multi-cultural. His work reveals the influence of global contemporary art. I recently visited his studio and was struck by his unbridled creativity and enthusiasm for experimentation. Zheng Chongbin conducts extensive experiments with materials, scale, space, and techniques, with a remarkably open mind and dynamism. He employs ink and acrylic to create rich textural effects reminiscent of snow and water, forests and stones, intending to represent unpredictable forces nature. Zheng disassembles and reassembles various elements, allowing them to intersperse, collide, and layer. He juxtaposes and contrasts artificial geometric forms with natural visual elements, forming varied complex structures, each bearing a unique visual character. For some of his large-scale installations, he uses aluminum honeycomb panel as a foundational support and experiments with methods of folding, twisting, and splicing, freeing the work from the constraints of two-dimensional planes, thus generating dynamic three-dimensional collages or assemblages, challenging the distinctions between painting and installation or sculpture. These works share certain visual principles with those of American artists, Frank Stella and Elizabeth Murray. In recent years, Zheng Chongbin has boldly contributed to the discourse of contemporary culture—expanding his artistic vocabulary, fusing the flow of nature with the solidity of architecture, mediating space and light, and exploring fundamental issues of vision and perception and the various relationships among humans, nature, environment, and technology.

The 1980s was an important period of growth for our generation and marks the beginning stages of the development of Chinese contemporary art. In 1985 Li Xiaoshan published "My Views on Contemporary Chinese Painting" in "Jiangsu Pictorial"; his "Theory of the End of Chinese Painting" explicated in the article sparked controversy in various cultural circles and incited an intellectual uproar. His declaration reverberated through the art world, echoing "painting is dead" which has been repeatedly heard in the West since the late 19th century. Are Yang Jiechang's muted "Thousand Layers of Ink", Zhang Yu's untraceable "fingerprints", Wang Tiande's ethereal "Burn-through Landscape", and Zheng Chongbin's deconstructed "Landscape" calls for rebellion and signs of innovation? These four artists did not reject tradition but reinvented it, allowing ink art to be born anew. Yang Jiechang revisits figurative painting, depicting elaborate historical and current events using meticulous brushwork, blends fables and reality, and imbues the tradition of Chinese painting with a new vitality. In the form of traditional blue-and-white porcelain, his ceramic works commemorate the tragedy of 1989, allowing the trauma of our generation to be processed in the context of delicate beauty. Zhang Yu, Wang Tiande and Zheng Chongbin have demonstrated an abiding interest in artistic exploration and have developed significant bodies of work, garnering international influence and renown. There is a faint echo of 20th century calls to arms that roar like an old computer rebooting: "Death of Painting", "The End of the Road", "Shock Therapy." However, now we can say ink art was "dead and then reborn".

April 23, 2022