ILLUSIONARY WONDERLAND — Ink Art in a New Age

Featuring around twenty works in various mediums by ten different artists, the group exhibition, Illusionary Wonderland, Ink Art in a New Age, aims to present the art of ink amidst its ongoing metamorphosis. Specifically, it explores how these artists work with and are inspired by ink, and how they are presenting themselves on a modern international stage, through different themes, subjects matters, visual motifs, and techniques. 

Ink art, in all its forms, has been characterized by constant metamorphosis and development since the beginning of modern time. Today, its essence represents the cultural, historical and symbolic aesthetic of East Asia. Although the art form is still closely associated with Eastern tradition, artists of the recent modernity who choose ink as their medium or a source of inspiration are increasingly seeking an alliance between ink art and modernity to rescue it from its status as an antiquity, a dying relic.  

Still, ink art will always carry with it the cultural and historical weight of the East Asian artistic legacy, which has faced its own challenges in the past century of rapid modernization. What is remarkable about contemporary ink art is how it has managed to break the binary oppositions between East and West, the native and the non-native, the traditional and the non-traditional, and continues to test the boundaries of different mediums, concepts, and subjects of discussion. Like an illusionary wonderland, it carries many imaginations and reinterpretations of a long-forgotten past, while still maintaining a bridge to modernity and real life.  

Artists: CHEN Liang, CHEN Xin, Michael Cherney, GAO Qian, JIN Jin, LEI Mingla, QIN Ai, REN Lihan, SHI Jianmin, WANG Tiande

Curated by Lin Li Academic Advisor: ZHENG Shengtian

Video Installation - Tradition is a foreign country